youtube – The Implausi.blog

Implausipod on Peertube too

Seeing as the podcast is available on YouTube, it seemed logical to mirror that content on Peertube as well. PeerTube is a video player that supports the ActivityPub protocol that powers the Fediverse, that we’ve talked about in various podcasts and blog posts before. Using the PeerTube also lets us use the POSsE (Post Once, Syndicate Everywhere) philosophy for content creation that we’ve mentioned before too, so if YouTube or other platforms become inhospitable, it is still possible to keep one’s stuff and move.

The ImplausiPod on PeerTube can be found here. We’ll also upload AppendixW videos to a separate channel as those become available. And as we create more general videos, we have a home for those too.

Implausipod E0013 – Context Collapse

Tiktok has a noise problem, and it’s indicative of a larger issue ongoing within social media, that of “context collapse”. But even context collapse is expanding outside its original context and evidence of it can be seen in the rise of generative AI tools, music and media, and the rise of the “Everything App”. Starting with a baseline in information theory and anthropology, we’ll outline some of the implications of noise and context collapse in this episode of the Implausipod.

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/13516713-implausipod-e0013-context-collapse

Transcript:

TikTok has a noise problem, and it may be due to a context collapse, something that’s been plaguing music, social media, and it’s even showing up in our new AI tools. And if you don’t know what that is, you’ll find out soon enough. We’ll explain it here tonight on episode 13 of the Implausipod.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. Now, when it comes to the issue of noise and context collapse, there’s a little bit more going on, of course. The problem for TikTok is that it started out with a pretty tasty signal, one that kind of really encouraged people to stick around. But as that signal amps up and it gets more and more noise in the system, it gets a little chunkier and crustier and maybe not as finely tuned as you’d like. Now, for some people that noise isn’t a problem, but for a lot of people it can be. And the reason it’s a problem for TikTok is that the noise can be actively discouraging from using the app. It can make it Unfun, and this is what I’ve been noticing lately. So let’s get into how context collapse is impacting life online.

When TikTok rose to prominence throughout the pandemic, it was a very tasty experience for a lot of people. I mean, if you had negative interactions there, there was probably reasons for it, but there was also ways to mitigate it. You could block people, you had a lot of control, and generally the algorithm would be feeding you content that you wanted to see. Or even if you know, you didn’t know you wanted to see it, you know that the joke goes. To that end, it was pretty good at sussing out what people found engaging. So TikTok had a very high signal to noise ratio. Yeah, there was some noise there, but that was because it was feeding stuff that it wasn’t quite sure that you liked. But once it kind of honed in on what your preferences were, it was really good system for delivering content to users.

Over time though, as more and more content goes out and more and more people start participating, the amount of tasty content, the amount of good content, the amount of interesting and novel content drops off. So you see less and are aware of pieces of information that everybody is seeing less, and less stuff – even within your niche from people that you’re following – gets shown to you. So this is all noise in the system. It’s the amount of stuff that you don’t want to see increasing.

Now we’re talking about signal to noise, and as we’re talking about a very old theory here, we’re talking about Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication. Now, it was “A mathematical theory of communication” when it was published in 1948 as a paper, and then it was reworked as a book with Warren Weaver in 1949, where it was The Mathematical Theory of Communication as they realized that the theory was more generalizable, and this theory undergirds the entirety of the internet and most of our modern telecommunication systems, and it’s just a way of dealing with the noise in a system and ensuring the signal gets sent as it was sent from the transmitter to the receiver. And you can talk about it in terms of human communication or machine to machine communication. Device to device. Point to point, and this is why it’s generalizable. It can be pretty much black boxed, and you can see this in how it gets used in multiple contexts. The point of the theory is that there’s a certain throughput that you need where the amount of information is greater than the noise to ensure that the signal is “understood”. And then there can be systems that are used to error check or correct or whatever, what’s on the receiving end to ensure that you know what was transmitted comes through as an intended, and that’s the gist of it.

Now for something like TikTok as the signal, you know, the signal is the content that’s supposed to be delivered to the end user, and the noise is anything that isn’t part of that. It’s the stuff they’re not necessarily looking for or asking for. And as TikTok has branched out and provided more types of content, starting with the 15 second videos and then 60 seconds, three minutes, 10 minutes, live stream, stories, whatever, you get more types of content in there. Not all of it’s gonna be relevant to all users. If somebody’s watching for some quick videos, even a 60-second or three minute video is definitely not gonna be what they want to see. So we have a variety of content in there and that increases the noise, the amount of stuff you don’t want to see in a given block of time.

Now, couple that with the other types of content that get filtered in. It can include ad sponsored posts or posts that are just generally low value. This can include things like, oh, so-and-so changed their name, so-and-so signed on, or what we’ve seen recently is the retro posts like on this day in 2021 or 2022 or whatever, where people will revisit old posts, and a lot of times there’s nothing special about those unless you haven’t seen it before. It’s just whatever’s that person was talking about a year ago. So that feeds into the pipeline with all the current content that’s also trying to get out to the user base as the user base is increasing. So we have this additional content that’s coming through the pipeline, increasing the signal, but there’s also more stuff, more stuff that you don’t want to see.

It’s noisy,

and that noise, as we stated earlier, makes it unfun. It’s like it directly interferes with the stickiness of the app, the ability for it to engage the audience and have them participate in what the actions that are going online. And as that’s directly part of what Tiktok’s business model is: capture an audience and keep them around, then that can be a problem for them.

But it also brings us into that idea of the collapse of context. Now context collapse is something that was theorized about by a number of media scholars in the early 2000s, including danah boyd and Michael Wesch, and a few others. In its most simplest form, it’s what happens when media that’s designed for one audience or a single audience gets shared to multiple audiences, sometimes unintended. For early social media, and in this case, that means like MySpace and Facebook and Twitter, media that was shared for a particular group – often a friend group – could go far beyond the initial context. And while those websites or apps, along with blogs and web forums were co-constitutive of the public sphere, as we talked about a few episodes ago, along with the traditional media. Context really didn’t start smooshing together until Web 2.0 started shifting to video with the advent of YouTube and the other streaming sites, and that’s the technical term, smooshing. You can update your lexicons accordingly.

But the best way to describe context collapse was captured by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch in a 2009 issue of Explorations in Media Ecology. He describes it and the problem as follows, quote:

“The problem is not lack of context. It’s context collapse, an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved the performer must assume for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a black hole sucking all of time and space, virtually all possible contexts in on itself.” End quote.

So he is talking then about the relatively new phenomenon of YouTube, which had only been around for about four or five years at that point, and what we now call creators producing content for viewing on that platform. It was that shift to cam life that had started previously, obviously, I mean there’s a reason YouTube was called what it was, but it went along with that idea of democratization of the technology, of the ability for pretty much anybody with a small technological outlay to produce a video and have it available online for others to see. Prior to the YouTube era, that would’ve been largely restricted to people with access to certain levels of broadcast technology, whether it was television or cable access, or a few other avenues. It wasn’t really as prevalent as we saw in, you know, the 21st century. And now with the growth of YouTube and the advent of Snapchat and TikTok, it really has completely taken over. But this is why it’s also still useful to look at some older articles because they give us an idea of what was novel at the time, what had changed, and this was really what was different with what was going on.

Michael Wesch is really drawing a lot from Goffman here and that idea of “the presentation of self in everyday life”, that we have different behaviors and there’s different aspects of ourselves that we will bring to the forefront in different contexts. So whether it’s at school or work or with our family or parents or friends or loved ones or what have you, we’re all slightly different in the way that we act around them. And this has been observed for a lot of different people in a lot of different contexts. But with the rise of what I’ll call here the mediated self and the complete flattening of all contexts due to, you know, Snapchat and Reels and TikTok, it has really taken a new turn.

Now, that idea of presentation of self for multiple audiences through vlogging, through YouTube, it isn’t exactly new because there was other versions of that before. In a presentation by Dr. Aiden Buckland, he goes into some of the critiques of this, that a media archeologist or media historian could draw a pretty straight lineage from diarization and life writing as a practice that occurred on blogs through to the modern practices that we see with video logs or just TikTok and Snapchats. This, in turn, is drawing heavily on the works of Dr. Michael Keren, who wrote a lot about blogs and their political action in the late nineties and early 2000s. But I digress. I’m starting to get a little bit further afield.

One of the ways to theorize Context collapse is that it’s like if every moment that you have that is recorded was available for instant replay at any time. And with the advent of video services moving to the cloud and having everything accessible (and looking at YouTube’s archives, now you can go back to basically when they began), we have that idea of instant replay. So it isn’t just a context collapse in terms of anything might be available to multiple audiences, but it’s also a Time collapse in that everything is always available to all potential audiences, and this extension of the context collapse to encompass multiple times or at least all times that are recorded and stored in the cloud has been discussed by authors Petter Bae Brandtzaeg of Oslo and Marika Lüders. Now there’s a very obvious link to this, to the rise of what’s called cancel culture, and I’d be remiss if I went without mentioning it, but that’s kind of beyond the scope of what we’re discussing here. That’s a different thread, a different track that we will have to pursue at some time in the future. The other implication of this time collapse is something that we’ve discussing here on the podcast more recently, namely media, especially music, and AI.

In terms of media, this context collapse, this time collapse is happening because obviously everything is available everywhere, all at once, at least for the most part. Things are currently in a state of flux, especially when it comes to television and film. The advent of the streaming services where each carved off a particular portion of the IP catalog that they happen to own has really changed how things have been interacting, but when it comes to music where streaming can basically all be done through one particular service, Spotify, with a few additional ones with minor catalogs, the impacts of that time collapse and context collapse are much more noticeable.

In an article published on The Atlantic in January of 2022, author Ted Gioia asked “Is old music killing new music?”. The author found that over 70% of the US market was going to songs that were 18 months or older, and often significantly so. Current rock and pop tracks now have to compete with the best of the last 60 years of recorded music. And while it is possible to draw some direct comparisons between the quality of the music as YouTuber Rick Beato did in a live stream on August 26th, 2023, where he asked: “Is today’s music bad?”, and looked at the top chart toppers from 50 years ago in August of 1973. You can argue that the overall production of music may be significantly better in 2023, but the overall composition, songwriting, and other elements may lack that magic that we saw, you know, 50 years ago. The most popular trend in music right now seems to just be a remix, a sample, a cover, or an interpolation of an older song. Even a chart topper like Dua Lipa draws heavily on the recreation of a seventies dance club aesthetic and sound. So context collapse, even if it isn’t necessarily killing new music, is definitely changing the environment in which it may be able to, you know, survive and thrive. The environment’s almost getting a little polluted.

It’s very noisy there.

However, one of the other places we’re seeing the impacts of this noise, this context collapse, is in the generative AI tools, or at least this is one of the places that the noise is being put to use. On a post on his blog on July 17th, 2023, author Stephen Wolfram talked about the development of these generative art tools and the processes that it goes through to actually create a picture. We work through the field of adjacent possibles that could be seen in something like a cat with a party hat on, and a lot of those images that are just a step or two removed for being a image that we as humans recognize shows up as noise. It turns out that what we think of as an image isn’t necessarily that random, and a lot of the pixels are highly correlated with one another, at least on a pixel-per-pixel basis. So if you feed a billion images into one of these models, in order to train it, you’re gonna get a lot of images that look highly similar, that are correlated with each other. And this is what Wolfram is talking about when he is talking about the idea of an “inter concept space”, that these images generally represent something or close to something. It’s not an arbitrary one either, but it’s one that’s aligned with our vision, something that we recognize, so a “human-aligned inter-concept space” that’s tied to our conception of things like cats and party hats.

But this “inter-concept” space is not only like ‘representative of’, but ‘fueled by’ the context collapse. It requires the digitization of everything, like a billion images that go into it in order for it to be trained. But it also, you know, squishes everything together. Again, our technical term, smoosh. And this smooshing brings us back to TikTok because everything is there. That’s part of what’s contributing to the noise, but it also is why there’s such a volume of a signal that’s there. You can likely find something and it’ll get algorithmically delivered to you if you like it enough or you interact with. But this is also how it’s captured so much of the public sphere in a way that the owner of Twitter wishes it could, and that idea of the context collapse seems to be made manifest in these apps that are trying to capture the public sphere, that they have to capture everything, everything all at once.

And so we’re seeing the rise of the Everything app, the everything website, much like we talked about a few weeks ago in episode 10 with the rise of a o l and how it as a portal was for a lot of users. The internet, it was the entirety of it. And we’ve seen subsequently with Facebook, we’re seeing a number of competitors, sometimes in different places around the world, catering to a particular locality, but all of them trying to capture that “One thing to all people, to all customers”. In China, we see it with the rise of WeChat, which allows for calls and texts and payments as well. In Moscow, we can see it with the various apps that are run by Yandex, where you could use it for everything from getting a taxi to communications to your apartment, and there’s a lot of tools built-in and it actually has its own currency system built-in as well. A user by the name of Inex Code posted a list of everything that you can do with Yandex in Moscow. In North America, we can see it with not just Facebook, but also with Apple and Google and Amazon too. The breadth of services that they have available, and the continual expansion of services that they’re adding to their apps and platforms. And when Elon Musk bought Twitter, it was theorized that one of the things you wanted to do was turn it into a WeChat like app. His recent comments about LinkedIn and the option of adding that kind of functionality to the app now known as X indicate that he may well be headed in that direction. And finally, the continual expansion of TikTok now include texts as well as a marketplace and music sales indicate there’s still more growth in that area too. As each of these walled garden “everything” apps try and gather up more functionality, we can see that this is one response to the context collapse: to provide a specific context within their enclosure.

It’s an effort to reduce the noise, or at least to turn it into something that happens outside their walls.

But setting up a wall may not be the only solution. It’s one way, obviously, that element of enclosure that’s taking place, but there’s other ways to deal with it as well. One way is a way we looked at with the Fediverse, where an everything app can be developed as long as it’s open. and there’s a lot of opportunity and possibility there, but that openness requires a fair amount of work by the user. It requires curation. It lacks the algorithmic elements that drive the enclosure of the other apps. Now, that doesn’t mean an algorithmic element couldn’t work for the Fediverse, it’s just that currently it’s not set up for it and may require a lot of effort to bootstrap something like that and get it going.

And absent an algorithm, it kind of points the way to the last two solutions that we have. The first one is just to lean into it to accept that there’s this change that’s happened to our society with the advent of digital media and everything being available. If the context collapsed, that’s fine. That’s just the way things are now, and we just have to learn to deal with it. And that leads into the second option. The one David Brin called The Transparent Society. And just that everything is available, and we’ll have to change our patterns of use. If we recognize that aspects of our culture are socially constructed, then we learn to live with that and we can change and adjust as necessary. Things haven’t always been the way they are currently, and they don’t have to continue that way either. Because the last way forward to deal with context collapse is to look at some areas of our culture that have already experienced it and seen how they’ve dealt with it. Because context collapse is intimately tied with that idea of availability of everything as well as in video terms, what Wesch is talking about was the instant replay.

And the two areas that have managed that and have continued to succeed in an era of streaming media and context collapse are pro sports and pro wrestling. The way they’ve succeeded is recognizing that they have their particular audience, that their audience will find them, that they don’t have to be everything for all audiences. And they’ve also succeeded by privileging the live, the now, the current event, something that revels in the instant replay, the highlight reel, the high spot, but also is allowed to continually produce new content because there might be a new highlight reel or a high spot in the very next game or match or show or finals or pay-per-view. There’s always something new coming down the pipeline and you best not look away. It turns out that the best way to deal with the noise is to create something that cuts right through it.

Once again, I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. It’s been a pleasure having you with us today. I hope you join us next time for episode 14 when we investigate the phenomenon of the dumpshock. In the meantime, you can find this episode and all back episodes at our new online home at www.implausipod.com, and email me at Dr. implausible at implausipod com. Until the next time, while you’re out there in the busyness and the noise, have fun.

References and Links:

Brandtzaeg, P. B., & Lüders, M. (2018). Time Collapse in Social Media: Extending the Context Collapse. Social Media + Society, 4(1), 2056305118763349. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118763349

Gioia, T. (2022, January 23). Is Old Music Killing New Music? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/old-music-killing-new-music/621339/

Shannon, C. E. (1948). A Mathematical Theory of Communication.

Wesch, M. (2009). Youtube and You: Experiences of self-awareness in the context collapse of the recording webcam. Explorations in Media Ecology, 8(2), 19–34.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-claude-shannons-information-theory-invented-the-future-20201222/

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305118763349

Generative AI Space and the Mental Imagery of Alien Minds

Implausipod EP008: Audience Commodity

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

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

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

Introduction

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other links and references:

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

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

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

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

Where is the line? AKA “Cuddlefication of Brutality”

Where is the line…
… when the joke stops being funny?
… between cosplay and copaganda?
… between parody and promotion?
… between representation and reinforcement?
… where the successive waves of Disneyization of the Star Wars universe have blurred the lines so much that we forgot what the original represents.
That those are indeed “the baddies”.
Because if we look at the subtext here, or perhaps even the literal text, it isn’t that subtle.

Then what we have here is objectively terrible:

A foot soldier of an authoritarian and fascist empire uses a war trophy taken as spoils following the extermination of a minority population and celebrates with the unboxing of a new weapon of war.

Did the above capture the essence of it?

Ah, it’s funny, it’s goofy, it’s relatable.
And through this cuddlefication of brutality*, the line continues to blur.

When we look back, can we tell when the line has been crossed? Or is that only something we can tell in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight?
(Do we know we’ve reached the Rubicon, or are we informed after the fact?)

Where we can say this, this is the point where we became accommodating, where we become comfortable with fascism, with the fun-loving stormtroopers and their goofy antics, where the clear delineations of the original films become blurred and muddied, cuddly and coddled.

So if this is the line, when do we step back? Can we back away? Are we already too late?

(*Perhaps I’m being dramatic? Maybe, but I don’t think so.)

The genesis for this was a cutesy stormtrooper “unboxing” video that circulated on social media, most notably the ‘Tube and the ‘Gram, with the cover that I embedded above. (There’s other similar videos up there as well.)

If you need to see the originals, you can find them on the following YouTube channel:

I had thought about directly embedding them, but decided not to based on the subject matter.

It’s possible to recognize that a lot of skill, talent, and resources went in to the production of the videos on that channel. We’re trying to address the broader impact of the spread of this content, and the underlying ideology that it supports.

This also was (one of) the reasons underlying the Not Feeling the Fourth post from a few weeks back. More on the other reason will be coming soon.