Tag: media studies

Soylent Culture

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 37 on September 22nd, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/15791252-e0037-soylent-culture

What is Soylent Culture? Whether it is in the mass media, the new media, or the media consumed by the current crop of generative AI tools, it is culture that has been fed on itself. But of course, there’s more. Have a listen to find out how Soylent Culture is driving the potential for “Model Collapse” with our AI tools, and what that might mean.

In 1964, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan published his work Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man. In it, he described how the content of any new medium is that of an older medium. This can help make it stronger and more intense. Quote, “The content of a movie is a novel, or a play, or an opera.

The effect of the movie form is not related to its programmed content. The content of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.” End quote. 

60 years later, in 2024, this is the promise of the generative AI tools that are spreading rapidly throughout society, and has been the end result of 30 years of new media, which has seen the digitalization of anything and everything that provides some form of content on the internet.

Our culture has been built on these successive waves of media, but what happens when there’s nothing left to feed the next wave? It begins to feed on itself, which is why we live now in an era of soylent culture.

Welcome to the Implausipod, an academic podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and in this episode, we’re going to draw together some threads we’ve been collecting for over a year and weave them together into a tapestry that describes our current age, an era of soylent culture.

And way back in episode 8, when we introduced you to the idea of the audience commodity, where media companies real product isn’t the shiny stuff on screen, but rather the audiences that they can serve up to the advertisers, we noted how Reddit and Twitter were in a bit of a bind because other companies had come in and slurped up all the user generated content that was so fundamental to Web 2. 0 and fundamental to their business model as well, as they were still in that old model of courting the business of advertisers. 

And all that UGC – the useless byproduct of having people chat online in a community that serve up to those advertisers – got tossed into the wood chipper, added a little bit of glue and paint, and then sold back to you as shiny new furniture, just like IKEA.

And this is what the AI companies are doing. We’ve been talking about this a little bit off and on, and since then, Reddit and Twitter have both gone all in on leveraging their own resources, and either creating their own AI models, like the Grok model, or at least licensing and selling it to other LLMs.

In episode 16, we looked a little bit more at that Web 2. 0 idea of spreadable media and how the atomization of culture actually took place. How the encouragement of that user generated content by the developers and platform owners is now the very material that’s feeding the AI models. And finally, our look at nostalgia over the past two episodes, starting with our look at the Dial-up Pastorale and that wistful approach to an earlier internet, one that never actually existed.

All of these point towards the existence of Soylent Culture. What I’m saying is is that it’s been a long time coming. The atomization of culture into its component parts, the reduction and eclipsed of soundbites to TikToks to Vines, the meme-ification of culture in general were all evidence of this happening.

This isn’t inherently a bad thing. We’re not ascribing some kind of value to this. We’re just describing how culture was reduced to its bare essentials as even smaller bits were carved off of the mass audience to draw the attention of even smaller and smaller niche audiences that could be catered to.

And a lot of this is because culture is inherently memetic. That’s memetic as in memes, not memetic as in mimesis, though the latter applies as well. But when we say that culture is memetic, I want to build on it more than just Dawkins’s original formulation of the idea of a meme to describe a unit of cultural transmission.

Because, honestly, the whole field of anthropology was sitting right over there when he came up with it. A memetic form of culture allows for the combination and recombination of various cultural components in the pursuit of novelty, and this can lead to innovation in the arts and the aesthetic dimension.

In the digital era, we’ve been presented with a new medium. Well, several perhaps, but the underlying logic of the digital media – the reduction of everything to bits, to ones and zeros that allow for the mass storage and fast transmission of everything anywhere, where the limiting factors are starting to boil down to fundamental laws of physics – 

this commonality can be found across all the digital arts, whether it’s in images, audio, video, gaming. Anything that’s appearing on your computer or on your phone has this underlying logic to it. And when a new medium presents itself due to changing technology, the first forays into that new medium will often be adaptations or translations of work done in an earlier form.

As noted by Marshall McLuhan at the beginning of this episode, it can take a while for new media to come into its own. It’ll be grasped by the masses as popular entertainment and derided by the high arts, or at least those who are fans of it. Frederick Jameson, who we talked about a whole lot last episode on nostalgia noted, quote, “it was high culture in the fifties that was authorized as it still is to pass judgment on reality.

to say what real life is and what is mere appearance. And it is by leaving out, by ignoring, by passing over in silence and with the repugnance one may feel for the dreary stereotypes of television series that high art palpably issues its judgment.” End quote. 

So, the new medium, or works that are done in the new medium, can often feel derivative as it copies stories of old, retelling them in a new way.

But over time, what we see happen again and again and again are that fresh stories start to be told by those familiar with the medium that have and can leverage the strengths and weaknesses of the medium, telling tales that reflect their own experiences, their own lives, and the lives of people living in the current age, not just reflections of earlier tales.

And eventually, the new medium finds acceptance, but it can take a little while.

So let me ask you, how long does it take for a new medium to be accepted as art? First they said radio wasn’t art, and then we got War of the Worlds. They said comic books weren’t art, and then we got Maus, and Watchmen, and Dark Knight Returns. They said rock and roll wasn’t art, and we got Dark Side of the Moon and Pet Sounds, Sgt.

Pepper’s and many, many others. They said films weren’t art, and we got Citizen Kane. They said video games weren’t art, and we got Final Fantasy VII and Myst and Breath of the Wild. They said TV wasn’t art, and we got Oz and Breaking Bad and Hannibal and The Wire. And now they’re telling us that AI generated art isn’t art, and I’m wondering how long it will take until they admit that they were wrong here, too.

Because even though it’s early days, I’ve seen and heard some AI generated art pieces that would absolutely count as art. There are pieces that produce an emotional effect, they evoke a response, whether it’s whimsy or wonder or sublime awe, and for all of these reasons, I think the AI generated art that I’ve seen or experienced counts.

And the point at which creators in a new medium produce something that counts as art often happens relatively early in the life cycle of that new media. In all of the examples I gave, things like War of the Worlds, Citizen Kane, Final Fantasy VII, these weren’t the first titles produced in that medium, but they did come about relatively early, once creators became accustomed to the cultural form.

As newer creators began working with the media, they can take it further, but there’s a risk. Creators that have grown up with the media may become too familiar with the source material, drawing on the representations from within itself. And we can all think of examples of this, where writers on police procedurals or action movies have grown up watching police procedurals and action movies and they simply endlessly repeat the tropes that are foundational to the genre.

The works become pastiches, parodies of themselves, often unintentionally, and they’re unable to escape from the weight of the tropes that they carry. This is especially evident in long running shows and franchises. Think of later seasons of The Simpsons, if you’ve actually watched recent seasons of The Simpsons, compared to the earlier ones.

Or recent seasons of Saturday Night Live, with the endlessly recycled bits, because we really needed another game show knock off, or a cringy community access parody. We can see it in later seasons of Doctor Who, and Star Trek, and Star Wars, and Pro Wrestling as well, and the granddaddy of them all, the soap opera.

This is what happens with normal culture when it is trained on itself. You get Soylent Culture. 

Soylent Culture is this, the self referential culture that is fed on itself, an ouroboros of references that always point at something else. It is culture comprised of rapid fire clips coming at the audience faster than a Dennis Miller era Saturday Night Live weekend update. Or the speed of a Weird Al Yankovic polka medley.

It is 30 years of Simpsons Halloween episodes referring to the first 10 years of Simpsons Halloween episodes. It is the hyper referential titles like The Family Guy and Deadpool, whether in print or film, throwing references at the audience rapid fire with rhyme and reason but so little of it, that works like Ready Player One start to seem like the inevitable result of the form.

And I’m not suggesting that the above works aren’t creative. They’re high examples of this cultural form; of soylent culture. But the endless demand for fresh material in an era of consumption culture means that the hyper-referentiality will soon exhaust itself and turn inward. This is where the nostalgia that we’ve been discussing for the previous couple episodes comes into play.

It’s a resource for mining, providing variations of previous works to spark a glimmer in the audience’s eyes of, hey, I recognize that. But even though these works are creative, they’re limited, they’re bound to previous, more popular titles, referring to art that was more widely accessible, more widely known.

They’re derivative works and they can’t come up with anything new, perhaps. 

And I say perhaps because there’s more out there than we can know. There’s more art that’s been created that we can possibly experience in a lifetime. There’s more stuff posted to YouTube in a minute than you’ll ever see in your 80 years on the planet.

And the rate at which that is happening is increasing. So, for anybody watching these hyper referential titles, if their first exposure to Faulkner is through Family Guy, or to Diogenes is through Deadpool, then so be it. Maybe their curiosity will inspire them to track that down, to check out the originals, to get a broader sense of the culture that they’re immersed in.

If they don’t get the joke and look around and wonder why the rest of the audience is laughing at this and say, you know, maybe it’s a me thing. Maybe I need to learn more. And that’s all right. It can lead to an act of discovery; of somebody looking at other titles and curating them, bringing them together and developing their own sense of style and working on that to create an aesthetic.

And that’s ultimately what it comes down to. Is art an act of learning and discovery and curation? Or is it an act of invention and generation and creation, or these all components of it? If an artist’s aesthetic is reliant on what they’ve experienced, well, then, as I’ve said, we’re finite, tiny creatures.

How many books or TV shows can you watch in a lifetime to incorporate into your experience? And if you repeatedly watch something, the same thing, are you limiting yourself from exposure to something new? And this is where the generative art tools come back into play. The AI tools that have been facilitated by the digitalization of everything during web 1. 0 and the subsequent slurping up of everything into feeding the models. 

Because the AI tools expand the realm of what we have access to. They can draw from every movie ever made, or at least digitalized. Not just the two dozen titles that the video store clerked happened to watch on repeat while they were working on their script, before finally following through and getting it made.

In theory, the AI tools can aid the creativity of those engaging with it, and in practice we’re starting to see that as well. It comes back to that question of whether art is generative or whether it’s an act of discovery and curation. But there’s a catch. Like we said, Soylent cultures existed long before the AI art tools arrived on the scene.

The derivative stories of soap operas and police procedurals and comic books and pulp sci-fi. But it has become increasingly obvious that the AI tools facilitate Soylent culture, drive it forward, and feed off of it even more. The A. I. tools are voracious, continually wanting more, needing fresh new stuff in order to increase the fidelity of the model.

That hallowed heart that drives the beast that continually hungers. But you see, the model is weak. It is Vulnerable like the phylactery of a lich hidden away somewhere deep.

The one thing the model can’t take too much of is itself: model collapse is the very real risk of a GPT being trained on text generated by a large language model identified by Shumailov, et al, and “ubiquitous among all learned generative models” end quote. Model collapse is a risk that creators of AI tools face in further developing those tools.

Quoting again from Shumailov: “model collapse is a degenerative process affecting generations of learned generative models in which the data they generate end up polluting the training set. of the next generation. Being trained on polluted data, they then misperceive reality.” End quote. This model collapse can result in the models ‘forgetting’ or ‘hallucinating’.

Two terms drawn not just from psychology, but from our own long history of engaging with and thinking about our own minds and the minds of others. And we’re exacting them here to apply to our AI tools, which – I want to be clear – aren’t thinking, but are the results of generative processes of taking lots of things and putting them together in new ways, which is honestly what we do for art too.

But this ‘forgetting’ can be toxic to the models. It’s like a cybernetic prion disease, like the cattle that developed BSE by being fed feed that contained parts of other ground up cows that were sick with the disease. The burgeoning electronic minds of our AI tools cannot digest other generated content.

And in an era of Soylent Culture, where there’s a risk of model collapse, where these incredibly expensive AI tools that require mothballed nuclear reactors to be brought online to provide enough power to service them, that thirst for fresh water like a marathon runner in the desert, In this era, then the human generated content of the earlier pre AI web becomes a much more valuable resource, the digital equivalent of the low background steel that was sought after for the creation of precision instruments following the era of atmospheric nuclear testing, where all the above ground and newly mined ore was too irradiated for use in precision instruments.

And it should be noted that we’re no longer living in that era because we stopped doing atmospheric nuclear testing. And for some, the takeaway for that may be that to stop an era of Soylent culture, we may need to stop using these AI tools completely. But I think that would be the wrong takeaway because the Soylent culture existed long before the AI tools existed, long before new media, as shown by the soap operas and the like.

And it’s something that’s more tied to mass culture in general, though. New media and the AI tools can make Soylent Culture much, much worse, let me be clear. Despite this, despite the speed with which all this is happening, the research on model collapse is still in its early days. The long term ramifications of model collapse and its consequences will only be learned through time.

In the meantime, we can discuss some possible solutions to dealing with Soylent Culture. Both AI generated and otherwise. If Soylent Culture is art that’s fed on itself, then the most effective way to combat it would be to find new stuff. To find new things to tell stories about. To create new art about.

Historically, how has this happened with traditional art? Well, we’ve hinted at a few ways throughout this episode, even though, as we noted, in an era of mass culture, even traditional arts are not immune from becoming soylent culture as well. One of the ways we get those new artistic ideas is through mimesis, the observation of the world around us, and imitating that, putting it into artistic forms.

Another way we get new art is through soft innovation when technologies enhance or change the way that we can produce media and art, or where art inspires the development of new technology as they feed back and forth between each other, trading ideas. And as we’ve seen throughout this episode and throughout the podcast in general, new media and new modes of production can encourage new stories to be told as artists are dealing with their surroundings and whatever the current zeitgeist is and putting that into production with whatever media that they have available.

As our world and society and culture changes, we’re going to reflect upon our current condition and tell tales about that to share with those around us. And as we noted much. Earlier in this particular episode, that familiarity with a form, a technical form, allows those who are using it to innovate within that form, creating new, more complex, better produced and higher fidelity works in whatever medium they happen to be choosing to work in.

And ultimately that comes down to choice. By the artists and the audience and the associated industries that allow the audience to experience those works, whether they are audio, visual, tactile, experiential, like games, any version of art that we might come in contact with. The generation and invention in the process is important to be sure, but the curation and discovery is no less important within this process.

And this is where humans with an a sense for aesthetic and style will still be able to tell. How would an AI tool discover or create? How could it test something that’s in the loop? The generative AI tools can’t tell. They have no sense. They can provide output, but no aura, no discernment. Could an AI run a script that does A-B testing on an audience for each new generated piece of art to see how they react, and the most popular one gets put forward?

I guess so, it’s not outside the realm of possibility, but that isn’t really something that they’re able to do on their own, or at least I hope not. 

Would programming in some variance and randomness in the AI tools allow for them to avoid the model collapse that comes with ingesting soylent culture in much the same way that we saw with the reveries for the hosts in the Westworld TV series?

Well, the research by Shumailov et al that we mentioned earlier suggests that that’s possibly not the case. I mean, it might help with the variation, perhaps, but that doesn’t help with the selection mechanisms, the discernment. 

AI is a blind watch, trying to become a watchmaker, making new watches. The question might be, what would an AI even want with a watch anyways?

Thank you for joining us on the Implausipod. I’m your host Dr. Implausible. We’ll explore more on the current state of AI art tools and their role as assistive technologies in our next episode. called AI Refractions. But before we get there, we need to return to our last episode, episode 36, and offer a postscript on that one.

Even though it’s been only a week, as of the recording of this episode, September 22nd, 2024, we regret to inform you of the passing of Professor Frederick Jameson, who was the subject of episode 36. As we noted in that episode, he was a giant in the field of literary criticism and philosophy, and a long time professor at Duke University.

Our condolences go out to his family and friends. Rest in peace. If you’d like to contact the show, 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 a Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license. 

You may have noticed at the beginning of the show that we described the show as an academic podcast, and you should be able to find us on the Academic Podcast Network when that gets updated. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there is 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. 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 then, take care and have fun.

Bibliography

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

Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y., Gal, Y., Papernot, N., & Anderson, R. (2024). The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget (No. arXiv:2305.17493). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.17493

Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y., Papernot, N., Anderson, R., & Gal, Y. (2024). AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature, 631(8022), 755–759. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y

Snoswell, A. J. (2024, August 19). What is ‘model collapse’? An expert explains the rumours about an impending AI doom. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/what-is-model-collapse-an-expert-explains-the-rumours-about-an-impending-ai-doom-236415

The Nostalgia Curve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 7G Network

Online spaces have often been labeled as ‘toxic’, and new entrants to an online community may unwittingly run into this before really engaging with the community. We’ve talked about this on the podcast a couple times, at least in passing, over the last two years (E0010 Eternal September, E0014 Dumpshock, and E0032 Baked In would all qualify, for a start), but this idea of the 7G network is something I started working on for a conference paper back in 2021.

At the time, I was frustrated with the behaviours I was witnessing in the D&D community within TikTok, and recognized some of the behaviours as being strikingly similar to ones I had noticed around gaming web-forums over two decades earlier. So I began to catalogue those practices, and how the members of online communities would deploy them, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unknowingly, and how these practices, these doxa, made the online space a worse place to be in, driving people away, often never to return.

So as part of an effort to communicate some better practices for online communities, I’m publishing these here (while I continue to work on the full paper) in hopes that people can recognize these toxic elements and take steps to stop or remove them when they occur.

The ‘G’ in 7G Network is mostly a mnemonic, as it helps to keep the characteristics in mind, and it is by no means an exhaustive list. The seven are Gatekeeping, Gaslighting, Gravedancing, Grandstanding, Griefing, Grifting and Grooming. The toxicity of most of these should be self-evident, but in case there’s some ambiguity I’ll go into them in a bit more detail below. The ‘Network’ part of the term means you’ll often find the toxic characteristics working in concert; where there’s one, there are likely to be more. This can also help when trying to identify some of the more subtle characteristics like Grifting and Grooming. Not sure if something qualifies as grifting? Were there other toxic characteristics that you noticed? Perhaps being a little more reticent in your interactions is warranted…

But without (much) further ado, let’s see what we’re talking about.

Gatekeeping is that class of activities that focus on exclusion. If the subcultural wars are a battle for territory waged using social and gamer capital, the gate is at the boundary of that territory.  It defines the limits of the group, the marker for inclusion or exclusion. And it is continually contested.

Gaslighting is the denial of objective reality for your audience. Now, there can be some quibbles about “objective reality”, but we’re not getting into the edge cases here. We’re dealing with “sun rises in the West” levels of denialism here. While gaslighting has gotten more attention in the “post-truth” era of the current political landscape, it still manifests in some ways in geek subcultures too. There’s different kinds of gaslighting too: we’ll group them as overt and covert for ease of use.

Gravedancing is a form of communal organizing and editing of collective memory. Once a person has been chased out of the community, there will often be a period of celebration, where the community justifies their actions, in which community members congratulate themselves on how they came together and worked towards a common goal.  Of course, that goal is ostracism and exclusion, but they were able to put aside whatever other differences they may have and achieve something, so it can often be somewhat celebratory. The community will engage in a reification of the past event, restating the reasons why the offender had to be chased out, and reframing the event in the groups’ collective memory.

Grandstanding is the typical online posturing and performative “tough talk” that is somewhat endemic in online spaces, where internet users drastically overstate their prowess, ability, and credentials from the safety of the couch or behind their keyboard, free from immediate reprisal and unlikely to be fact-checked or called on it.

Griefing is online harassment, trolling, and bullying, and we are grouping these here under the singular “griefing” which is a form of harassment common in online video games (Chesney, 2009).

Grifting. The prevalence of #venmo, #cashapp and other payment details in bios facilitates this. This is a challenge, of course, as not every cry for aid on GoFundMe is a grift, especially in the era of the gig economy typical of late-stage capitalism in the 21st century. Rather, the ease of payment options and transactions has made the opportunity for grifting that much easier. The barrier to entry is that much lower.

Grooming is the set of behaviours “in which an adult builds an emotional relationship with a minor in order to gain the minor’s trust for the purposes of future or ongoing sexual contact, sexual abuse, trafficking, or other exploitation.” (Bytedance, Inc., 2022). As these appear

To sum up (well, the sum should be “7”, but in words…), the 7G Network is a heuristic, a collection of interconnected hostile and anti-social behaviours that can be used to identify the if an online space is particularly “toxic”, however that might be defined.

And as a heuristic, it isn’t set in stone. The 7G is a mnemonic, and any or all of the components might be swapped out at some point. But it is a starting point, and I’ll share more on the heuristic and how it might be deployed in the coming weeks.

Bibliography:

Chesney, T., Coyne, I., Logan, B., & Madden, N. (2009). Griefing in virtual worlds: Causes, casualties and coping strategies. Information Systems Journal, 19(6), 525–548. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2575.2009.00330.x

Swift Studies

A recent article on an academic conference devoted to Taylor Swift prompted some discussion online. The article by Emily Yahr was posted on Dec 26, 2023, here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/2023/12/26/taylor-swift-eras-conference-academic/

My response was as follows:

I felt similarly perhaps 15-20 years ago when a college offered a semester length course on the topic of Lady Gaga, and I was aghast, but then I kinda got out of it.
Taylor Swift is no different in this regard, though I think the Swifties are more of a force than the Monster ever were.
But that’s the thing: the fact that both of them have a fanbase large enough to be a) identified by name and b) make an impact beyond the pop music sphere warrants the study.

And it’s not like pop-culture focused conferences are a new thing. From the article:
“One academic told her that, after speaking at events focused on Bob Dylan, Nirvana and the Beatles, they were thrilled to discuss a prominent female artist.”
… so there is this, at least, with expanding the scope of artists that can be discussed.

I think that’s pretty swell.

(And in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve presented on pop-culture related topics academically at the PCA before, as well as several Games Studies and Film Studies conferences before.)

I think there’s value in the conference though. The budget is usually pretty minimal, relatively speaking, from my experience with a couple organizing committees. It let’s the researchers get some reps in too, which honestly can be invaluable.

And obviously there is *something* going on with the Swift and her fanbase, so a bit of scrutiny isn’t a bad thing, even if I’m not on board with Lacanian interpretations of Swift’s Folklore either.

(Or anything Lacanian,tbh.)

When it comes to the utility of examining, pop-culture, I’ll grab a quote by Bruce Sterling from a couple decades past:

“The most fertile ground for analyzing motives is pop culture – not because pop culture is deep, but because it’s so shallow. It’s where those wishes and longings are most nakedly evident” (Sterling , 2002, pxii-xiii).

It was informative when I was looking at the role of #ScienceFiction back in the early Double-Ohs. It’s still solid now.

This whole subject was on my to-do list for the podcast a couple episodes from now. Look for an episode titled “The Old Man and the River” in the new year. I’ll link back to this when it gets posted.

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.