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Moral Ecosystems: My Big Idea

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 22:24:00 +0000

It’s said that thinkers are either foxes and hedgehogs. The fox knows many things, and the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ever since I heard about this I’ve known that I am a hedgehog. My one big idea is the idea of moral ecosystems: decentralized systems of moral belief and their relationship to our technological media environments. Since 2016 I have been exploring this idea and have made many attempts to explain it in different essays. None of these attempts have fully captured it, but I think the idea is so important and so explains certain features of our world that I keep trying again and again. In this piece I want to briefly outline how I arrived at this idea and developed it across my body of work.

1. Preliminary Conceptions

In 2015 and 2016 I became very interested in what a brand is and why people are attracted to them. My early explorations of the idea of “hype” as some kind of artificial scarcity or exclusivity did not on its own lead to a satisfying explanation of why brands mattered and exerted the influence they do. Closer examination led me to the idea of importance itself, or meaningfulness, as the right frame for understanding peoples’ attachment to brands. The frame of meaning had the advantage of not pathologizing the connection consumers have with brands, which I found helpful. Where many peers critiqued brand and the culture of consumerism they induced, this perspective helped me view the consumer’s affections more neutrally and search for the specific reasons in any case: why skaters like Vans, or design-conscious consumers like Braun products.

It was around this time that I started reading Magazine B, a Korean periodical dedicated to analyzing iconic brands. One issue inspired me in particular: the issue on Tsutaya bookstore in Japan. Tsutaya had been known for its downmarket used bookstore and video rental business and for its widely used loyalty points system. Their flagship store in Daikanyama changed all this. The Daikanyama T-Site is divided into sections where books are aligned with hobbies or lifestyles. In the same section, Tsutaya also sells objects related to that hobby or lifestyle. So next to a bicycle book section they literally sell bicycles; camera books with cameras and a knowledgeable camera salesperson; books about coffee next to the in-store Starbucks. Japan has long had strong hobbyist subcultures, so this move made particular sense in Japan, and has been very successful, serving as the model for future Tsutaya stores. But primarily it helped me see that between brand and consumer lay a mediating concept or entity, the lifestyle. Then I understood that brands do not succeed only because they codify certain product benefits to the consumer, but also because they signify of point to the lifestyle and its meanings. The lifestyle was then a broader community formed around aspirational consumption, but also consisting of certain social norms and ideas about what makes a participant part of it. Kevin Simler published a similar idea in his contemporaneous essay Ads Don’t Work That Way, in which he argued that ads work by telling the consumer what type of person ideally consumes the product.

A final influence on me during this period was Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s monograph Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Communities of Practice. This book was going around Are.na circles at the time, and Gary Chou had separately introduced me to the idea of communities of practice. Reading it was life-changing, as it opened up so many important ideas in one text. The relationship between social construction, affordance theory, identity formation, and community building were all described perfectly in this short book. The master stroke is Wenger and Lave’s reframing of all of socialization as learning. In particular the chapter detailing Alcoholics Anonymous as a community of practice was a revelation. To paraphrase the authors: people join AA as drinking non-alcoholics, and through participation become alcoholic non-drinkers. They achieve this through the storytelling practice of the community. In this sense what the AA community of practice is involved in producing is the identity of the alcoholic.

With this last reference, I had all the ingredients. Wenger and Lave’s learning theory was the final piece, which allowed me to see that lifestyles and brands together formed decentralized pseudo-communities of practice, where the product at stake was an idealized consumer type, metaphorically represented by a starter pack meme. Through their interactions with other consumers and brands, people learn towards an ideal type, very much indeed like the AA case study. This perspective also led me to greater respect for the incipient meanings and sense of importance that the lifestyle offered.

2. The Moral Component

In 2018 I published After Authenticity, which was my first good work and the beginning of real intellectual development. The key to the piece was understanding the moral system that manifested itself in early ‘00s hipster behavior and how that moral system propagated, changed, and exhausted itself. My real innovation was that I didn’t just assume “authenticity” meant something fixed; instead I went about looking at the behaviors of the population that used this language and to whom it clearly meant something, and what those behaviors demonstrated about participants. Authenticity thus revealed itself as the byword for an ethical system.

Through this essay I saw that moral life has a powerful influence on human behavior. The shape of what is conceived as ethical, right, or good will determine the behavior of entire populations, and as I showed, ethical systems change over time. With this realization in hand I began to notice ethical systems everywhere and their relationships to products, as I had done in After Authenticity. For instance, I gave a talk at Ribbonfarm’s Refactor Camp explaining medieval sumptuary laws with this framework: the controlled distribution of clothing guaranteed the correct order of hierarchical society.

Around this time I started exploring Charles Taylor’s work. I was aware of his book A Secular Age from reading L. M. Sacasas’ blog, among other places. I happened to borrow his book The Ethics of Authenticity from a friend, and never gave it back. And Joe Edelman shared with me his 1977 paper “What Is Human Agency?” with me. Taylor was doing large scale philosophical histories of meaning—of moral ideas or moral sources as he calls them—in Western culture. What I managed on a very limited scale in After Authenticity, Taylor had perfected in his masterworks Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. I learned from Sources about the three main moral sources active in Western cultural life: Christian theology, utilitarian rationalism, and romantic expressivism. Over time I began to see these sources everywhere in contemporary culture. My ideas about authenticity, and my new thinking about the moral stances of crypto communities, was greatly enriched by Taylor’s ideas. He has left an indisputable mark on my thinking.

This interest in the moral provided something my previous conception of lifestyles had not. Part of what lifestyle participants were learning, incipiently at least, was some sort of moral idea. There is an idea in each lifestyle of what it means to live the good life, how one ought to live well. That said, I recognized, the branded versions of these networks could never deliver on the promises of moral action often set up in premise by “brand values” statements. Much later I would read Alasdair McIntyre’s book After Virtue, which would provide a better framing for the moral notion in a lifestyle. In sports, hobbies, and games, there is some embedded notion of excellence or higher good. For chess mastery excellence looks like one thing, for skate it looks another way, but both pertain not just to technical mastery but also the personality and attitudes of the master, or what Wenger and Lave would call an “old-timer” in a community of practice. Brands gesture to these ideas of excellence, but they are only lived out, or fulfilled, by the lifestyle participants themselves.

I did not have this notion of the excellence immanent to an activity back then, but the disjuncture between the promise of brands and their lived fulfillment was clear to me. That gap implied that a more direct fulfillment of moral life or higher forms of excellence was indeed possible. This became the subject of my essay Life After Lifestyle. This essay took these ideas and pointed to what could go beyond the lifestyle mode of organizing people, ideas, and goods. Not that lifestyles are intentionally organized; they are rather the natural outgrowth of subcultures, hobby groups, the companies that grow to support those formations, and advertising networks. But could they be organized more intentionally?

In my early explorations of brands I had been interested in their difference from cults, as the comparison was always made favorably by marketers and disfavorably by critics. Through a workshop at Pioneer Works I developed an idea of what any cultural system is made of, whether brand, lifestyle, or cult. At this point I called any such formation a system of meaning. My ideas were naturally coming together, and I was now imagining systems of meaning that would be more robust than lifestyles, which would deliver on their moral premises: something more cultish, made up of intangibles like a brand, but involving more sincere moral engagement. (It has been pointed out that the term sincere does a lot of heavy lifting in my body of work. Briefly, what I mean by it is an engagement with an activity or theme or way of life that is taken up wholeheartedly—not necessarily without reservation but without any holding back, without *avoidance* or ironic distancing and also without facade or artifice. Brand values are not sincere; a hiker’s love of hiking and pursuit of the outdoors is.) The comparison to religions was a natural one, and I said as much in Life After Lifestyle. It must be mentioned that Aaron Z. Lewis, my friend and intellectual colleague, was well ahead of me in these respects. His 2019 essay Metaphors We Believe By demonstrated clearly how worship and sacredness, gods and demons, still enchant the world, especially technological communities.

But this was not the end of my Big Idea’s development.

3. Technological Transformation

2019 was an intellectually generative year, and also the year I began working in the cryptocurrency industry in earnest. I had had a few prior consulting engagements in that space, but in 2019 I started working as Jesse Walden’s writing coach and editor. This was my introduction to many new ideas. I also spent the summer of 2019 in Berlin as a research resident at Trust, where I found intellectual community with the artist-technologists and theorists exploring similar themes. I spent the summer lecturing on the theme of agency and was invited to a crypto unconference by someone who had seen one of my talks. I brought along Laura Lotti and Sam Hart, who already had much more crypto knowledge than me. When the opportunity came to give impromptu talks I proposed we share a panel on the only thing I knew a lot about—this brand theme. We did a five minute rehearsal and the idea of a brand as a consensus system, comparable to blockchain protocols, seemed to hold up. It tracked with my earlier ideas and proved remarkably good for explaining Bitcoin. We decided to write up the talk and this became the essay Headless Brands.

What we described in Headless Brands was a flavor of what I had in mind all along: decentralized community meaning-making around central tenets and themes. I had not written Life After Lifestyle yet, and in fact I thought I had given the game away when many people responded asking if a religion was a headless brand or vice versa. (No, I responded—it largely misses the moral component. But Bitcoin’s later heavy adoption by Christian missionaries proved me wrong here.) My worries were unfounded though, as agencies and marketers responded to Headless Brands simply by continuing the trend of generative brand identity systems. Adaptive brand identities are brands with heads, even if the face changes slightly. I have always tried to clarify that a headless brand, like a lifestyle, cannot be designed. It is created by disparate actors responding to crypto’s technologically-encoded incentive networks.

Thinking about the incentives involved in creating large crypto token ecosystems pointed to a new puzzle however. Since the 2016 election, ideas of filter bubbles, red pills, and radicalization via ideological funnels had been very popular. There was a general awareness that algorithmic incentives were responsible for these funnels. I now started to think about incentives on a broader level.

Any given brand tries to affiliate itself with a lifestyle by pointing to it. It wants to be the ideal expression of that lifestyle. And there will be an ecosystem of companies feeding on any given lifestyle in this way. Some companies’ hold on a lifestyle will be so complete that it is incentive-compatible for them to grow the overall adoption of that lifestyle. Vans’ relationship with skate culture, Rapha or Giro with biking, or even Pioneer with DJing are examples. Because price stratification means that in many categories one can find a product at any price point, certain brands will cater to growing the pie, while others will target deepening the relationship with consumers. This dynamic environment of different companies may look like competition, but it is in fact cooperation: cooperation to create an overall funnel for that lifestyle. Of course, radicalization still happens here; movement deeper into the funnel offers a semblance of cultural coherence in our confused times. But when a person gets radicalized into a lifestyle or subculture, we don’t call them a radical, we call them a type of guy.

Competition reemerges, however, at the level of funnels themselves: the funnels are competing with one another to produce types of person that are profitable. This was clear to me in several ways. I had already seen since Tsutaya a literalized version of that funnel, and since the direct-to-consumer movement it was apparent that every company unavoidably was becoming a lifestyle brand. But other funnels were becoming more visible, for instance Alex Jones monetizing his red pills by selling supplements. My sense was that people became extruded into strange identity shapes as they progressed through these funnels, all the while feeling the hole was made for them. Finally, there was emerging what my friend Kara Kittel calls the “classification impulse:” the tendency to categorize anyone one sees online as a type of guy. That phenomenon was discussed well by Justin Smith in his essay It’s All Over. Overall, this funnel theory confirmed my understanding that successful brands would be the ones that point to strong ideological funnels rather than trying to encompass lifestyles entirely; the latter trend was documented and neutralized by Naomi Klein in No Logo.

The funnel idea is very alarming, and I haven’t worked out all its consequences. It begs that we look into spaces where such radicalization or type-of-guy production clearly occurs, and to map out the financial incentives at play across the entire funnel, not just any one brand or platform’s algorithms. This task I leave to more detail-oriented puzzle-solvers than I.

Yet the notion of the technological infrastructure of the funnel, lifestyle, or post-lifestyle construct has stayed with me, and finally led me to the current form of the idea.

4. Moral Ecosystems

The funnel theory and Life After Lifestyle both left me with a persistent question concerning the resilience of the ideological spaces I was now documenting—Effective Altruism, TPOT, QAnon, Lainite crypto cults, and increasingly health communities. By 2022 combative Twitter discourse had largely sorted people into various camps, and the different networks, each with its own moral impulse, were now visible to many. Still, I felt these communities were potentially fragile. In conversations with Aaron I referred to them as the scum that forms on the top of the pond, or algae blooms. They are products of or media ecosystem, but are merely floating on top of it. They do not themselves control it. If a supply chain shock or other extended crisis happened, I doubted these communities could organize their own response. They have power online, but limited power to control resources and goods in the world of institutions, law, servers, and sustenance.

Last year I made some progress on this thought when I sat down to write about whether there is still a “mainstream” in any meaningful respect. It seems to me that a mainstream culture barely exists; what is mainstream if anything is the media technologies, algorithms, and software products which produce these very different and sometimes quite niche communities. Likewise, the institutional infrastructure that upholds the built environment, legal system, political organizations, food provision, and so forth are used by everyone. But culture seems to have evacuated these institutions, which now operate in a siloed and rent-seeking way—universities being the exemplary case. On the other hand, these online funnels and post-lifestyle constructs, whether they operate in political, faith, historical, or scientific idioms, are now doing much of the socialization that formerly would have been provided by civic, educational, or formal religious institutions. I originally thought of calling these post-lifestyle networks “spiritual cultures” because I saw how at the heart of each is some strong notion of how life ought to be lived. Even in the case of the materialist (non-transcendent), atheistic, and secular cultures, like ancestral dieting or Effective Altruism, there is a notion of the good life. But I didn’t like how that phrase sounded in my mouth. Plus, I wanted to indicate that the substrate of institutional infrastructure they all rely on had largely abandoned its moral and civic promises. Ah!—to contrast with our amoral societal infrastructure: moral ecosystems.

I need not further explain what a moral ecosystem is. It has been my object of study for the last 8 years. I have documented the development of this idea here. I can now happily abandon the clunky “post-lifestyle construct.”

But let me offer a few last thoughts. I mentioned before that there is work to be done unpacking the incentive structures that make up a moral ecosystem, recruit and retain its members, police its boundaries, and shape its most committed participants. That is one task. But other large questions remain and are yet to unfold. The limitation of these moral networks, I have said, is their inability to interface with the local, with life on the ground, with the IRL, and with the institutions and physical resources which make them possible. The “pop-up city” and “network state” are two attempts to answer how they might do this. But there will be many more answers, and more efforts to bring them to ground are needed. No further online ideation is needed: these efforts must rely on-the-ground experimentation, trial and error. I participated in one such experiment called a schoolscape. The time for internet preaching and demagoguery has concluded. Your job, and mine, is to seize to the ground.

Beyond the hyperlocal, two further questions. Given this divide between moral ecosystems and institutionalized infrastructure, how must institutional change happen today? I would welcome the comments of Mr. Chris Beiser on this topic. Finally, these moral ecosystems must escape their status as mere discourse and idea: they must escape into the body, into the practices and the actions of the body, the body in local space. That is how the moral premises finally become fulfilled. But this is already happening, with the moral ecosystems that form around health and wellness practices. To document this I have started a new project called Care Culture. It is there that you must now follow me. I want you to see what I see, to understand and to become a part of our changing world.

Connecting the Dots on American Psychology

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 13:18:00 +0000

The terrain of American mental health is as vast and colorful as this country’s geography. I’ve been interested in exploring the landscape since 2019, when I dashed off a quick blog post on cultural differences in psychology. Backburnered for four years, the topic is now top of mind for me. My interest in the economies of cultural and spiritual production, the topic of Life After Lifestyle, led me right back to mental health and wellness. But there are many other cues that point me this direction. Something weird is clearly happening with American psychology.

One major factor is the expansion of diagnostic criteria for PTSD in the DSM-IV and DSM-V, which have helped make trauma into a singularly dominant cultural complex. While other disorder categories have undergone similar expansions, obsessive-compulsive disorders and anxiety disorders among them, trauma is unavoidable: it can be personal, generational, and cultural. My eyebrows always raise when I see a cultural concept get consolidated, reified, and applied to many categories. Such homogenization is often the precursor to a paradigm-breaking concept.

Where might such a paradigm shift come from? Set against the trauma-informed backdrop is a slow-motion explosion of psychiatric treatments and practices of all kinds. These range from psychodynamic “transformative modalities” like IFS or psychodrama, to the dozens of so-called “evidence-based” behavioral therapies on offer, to TikTok superstitions like use of ice presses for trauma alleviation. Then there are the vast range of body-oriented “scientific” processes like EMDR and tapping, and somatic strains of psychodynamic therapies. Of course, secularized meditation and yoga practices are also being leveraged as healing techniques, along with even more left-of-field practices like Rolfing, reiki, and holotropic breathwork. Finally, psychedelic therapy seems to be an unstoppable juggernaut, soon to be integrated into our healthcare system.

What to make of this? On the one hand, the DSM enshrines legal, insured, prescribed notions of mental illness and health. On the other, the sheer diversity of treatments and practices make it impossible to paint a unified picture of today’s mental health landscape. While many of these practices embrace trauma theory as their focus, others have distinct views of energy, the nervous system, and suffering. What’s most striking is that to some degree, they all seem to work. What accounts for their success or lack thereof?

These are big questions, and I’m starting to think this is what I’d like to spend the next bit of my career on. Let me try to articulate an interesting idea I’ve been developing about mental health and wellness in America.

I got turned on to this topic again when I read Gilbert Seldes’ book The Stammering Century. Seldes covers American cults and movements of the 19th century, from Christian camp meetings to the Mesmerist mania to various “electrical” quack cures. Health isn’t the theme of the book; in the 19th century, movements are nearly always framed in moral terms. Many of them started out as explicitly Christian movements, but evolved over the century by introducing stranger and more secular ideas: a Christian fruitarian diet, a Christian free love commune, a Christian prohibition movement. With the introduction of European “mind cure” manias like Mesmerism and phrenology, theological framings became less relevant. By the start of the 20th century, Christian Science and New Thought, two precursors to today’s “manifestation” theories, had grown in popularity.

Today’s diet obsessions and folk healing concepts have a century and a half of science to their advantage, but the wackiest of them are no less wacky than the Stammering Century’s weirdest lifestyles. I think it’s fair to say that today we have an even wider and weirder range of cures and movements. What I believe accounts for divergence in health concepts both then and now is confusion on the deepest levels of cultural reality. It’s easy to see by looking at the 19th century first.

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Metaphysically and morally, the 19th century was a tumultuous period: theism faltered as it contested with an unfolding secularity and the growing power of Romanticism. Early commercial industrialism and increasing urbanism created large populations of impoverished and disenfranchised wage laborers. New discoveries in science, such as electricity, germ theory, and the unconscious, created a new repertoire of mental models for members of educated society. This upheaval, I think, is the context that required new theories of “wellness” to be worked out in practice. Seldes shows vividly how the era’s communes and manias had to work quite hard to make sense of these different concepts and moral sources. Phrenology, for instance, was more than just the reading of character traits from funny head shapes; it was a whole physiological theory of human characteristics and a way of approaching moral problems. Seldes says that according to phrenology “there should be no punishment for children; instead the organ counteracting the one responsible for misdeeds was to be exercised and developed.” Here we see not only phrenology undermining the Christian notion of sin and damnation, but also a behaviorist lineage which culminates in our time with cognitive behavioral therapy.

In other words, I read these developments as a process of creative evolution: society’s attempt to find a notion of illness and health that “fit” emerging models of self and society. The framework that eventually did find fit, of course, was psychoanalysis. Freud was a medical doctor and considered psychoanalysis a science. His insights on the role of past events in unconscious adult behavior, for instance, were revolutionary. But in other ways, he is very much the successor of other 19th century health movements. In my reading, Freud not only made true discoveries about the human mind; with his framework of the id, ego, and super-ego, he also synthesized moral ideas of his era into a unified cultural model of pathology and mental health. While his influence is now downplayed in university psychology departments, today we can barely think without using Freudian terms. Trauma, repression, and neuroses are part of our mental furniture.

This sets the stage for what’s happening in mental health today. While the basic techniques of psychoanalysis held prestige among clinicians until the end of WWII, from the 50s onward a splintering began, leading to transactional, gestalt, and client-centered therapies, and of course the resuscitation of the behavioral therapy lineage. Fast forward to today, and there is a striking resemblance between the pre-Freudian landscape and our current moment. I believe we could be in the midst of a divergent era, much like the one Seldes documented. What are the underlying features of today’s healing arts? What cultural concepts are they drawing on? The influence of Asian religious practices on the West during the 20th century, which traveled through influential networks like the Esalen Institute, cannot be understated here.

Moreover, how do social networked technologies change these cultural concepts? I diagnosed the causes of confusion over 19th century health concepts as a response to the emergence of new types of selves (industrial, urban, secular). It barely needs saying that we’ve lived through an equally momentous transition with the development of the internet. One fascinating recent paper characterizes TikTok Tourette’s syndrome as a mass sociogenic illness. Is this framing correct, or are we seeing experiments in different types of selves? New understandings of what is human will give us new understandings of what is pathological—and what is healthy. In a number of places, I’ve articulated my sense of a tentative yet growing collectivist cultural mythology, one that is deeply linked to use of technology. Could this mythology, perhaps drawing from Jung more than Freud, be tapped into for therapeutic purposes?

If my suspicions are right, all this spiritual entrepreneurship I’ve been documenting is playing the role of competitive evolution towards a new synthesis, a new way of making sense of mental health in the West. We may be surprised at what happens in the coming decades; we may end up with concepts of wellness and illness that do not exist today.

There are a million sorts more trails to go down here, but there’s my rough sketch of the territory as I see it. In order to get at these big questions I’m interested, I’m having to break them down into smaller ones.

How did different psychoanalytic concepts spread through popular culture and gain adoption?
What kind of cultural assumptions does the trauma concept require to function?
Is it possible to measure the biophysical and cultural operants of a treatment separately?
What role does the patient’s will to get better play in their psychological health? What is a placebo?
What is happening in the body during talk therapy?
What role does the body play in mediating cultural notions of health illness and health—with or without the help of language?
What ideas and assumptions do AI therapy chatbots introduce into the therapeutic relationship?

Ok, so most of these questions aren’t small after all. I’ll need all the help I can get answering them! I’ve been reading up on medical anthropology literature and the history of psychology to understand the origin point of American mental health concepts. I also want to read Freud’s major works before the end of the year, hopefully with help from my buddy @qorprate. Lastly, I’ve also been digging back into the earlier work of my favorite philosopher, Charles Taylor. His collected Philosophical Papers are a brutal critique of behaviorist and biomedical models of psychology. I’m partial to his views, but I’m trying to remain as open as possible and allowing myself to approach the most basic concepts with a fresh view.

I’m also learning a lot from others as I think more about these topics. I’ve been really enjoying my conversations with:

Justin Mares, about diet’s role in mental health and psychotherapy’s implicit cultural agenda
Olivia Norrmén-Smith, about medical anthropology
Rae Dinh, about psychedelics and integration work
Brian Schopfel, about social spaces that embody wellness concepts
Nathan Rice, about the overabundance of psychological theories
Jeffrey Kripal, Lawrence Wilkinson, Hong and Bora Kim, Sina Habibian, @userpreferences, Ellie Hain and Joe Edelman, Ankur Sharma, and others.

These have been horizon-expanding conversations. If you have ideas in this territory to share, I would look forward to having a conversation with you. I’m interested in all dimensions of this thought space! For instance, companies bringing psychedelics to market or experimenting with AI-driven CBT could be great contexts for interesting research. I’d also like to meet practicing clinical psychiatrists, researchers, and healers who are experimenting with new treatments for the types of problems patients are bringing them. And it would be great to speak with academic researchers in critical psychiatry or medical anthropology.

If that’s you, reach out. In the meantime, I’ll keep blogging on this topic as I figure things out.

On the Evolution of Credit Cultures

Mon, 08 May 2023 22:24:00 +0000

One of the exciting things I’m up to at Other Internet is working on a new research project with the Ethereum Foundation and Venkatesh Rao. If you haven’t heard about it yet, we’re part of a program called Summer of Protocols which hopes to promote new theories about protocols, as well as what Venkat calls “protocol literacy”: the ability to parse protocols’ conventions, usage codes, and design patterns. For everything from open source money to regulating plastic production, protocols are growing in adoption and importance, and as they do we’ll need more competence at designing and working with them. Bootstrapping a new intellectual field around the topic is exactly what the Summer of Protocols program aims to do.

Photo found on Are.na.

The theme of “literacy” is particularly resonant with the SoP project I’m working on alongside Kara Kittel. Our project is about credit cultures: protocols of attribution, authorship, and originality. Kara brings her extensive studies of participatory media and online communities, and the ownership conflicts that new media often sparks. Longtime readers of this blog will know that I’ve also explored how these ideas relate to images in the Diminishing Marginal Value, which looked at authorship debates in graphic design communities. With credit cultures, Kara and I are interested in looking at how new media are changing protocols and cultures of crediting. For instance, now that AI has made the latent space between images accessible, the marginal value of new human-produced imagery seems likely to approach zero. With AI-generated text, could the same happen to human-produced linguistic material?

A key difference between image and text authorship is the type of credibility that each confers. Recognition in the field of images has much to do with the artistic hero worship that is a major part of our culture. It confers status and power among image makers to be recognized as the initiator of a style and an influence on others. In certain cases, it’s possible for individuals to break out of an insular aesthetic subculture and into the mainstream, where they enjoy minor celebrity status. (That these people tend to be retconned as “artists,” though their main careers may be a more technical trade, shows how artist is one of the premiere paths to recognition in the West. I am thinking here of architects like Zaha Hadid, graphic designers like Paul Rand, and industrial designers like Karim Rashid.)

Now, there’s a way in which similar dynamics apply in the case of artistic “literary” text works like novels and poems; a classic book on this topic I plan to read is Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. But language also has a much broader utility, and more expansive notions of merit, than artistic recognition. Text-based linguistic communication is one of the foundations of trust in the legal, scientific, medical, and business institutions that largely govern our world. The ability to write—to communicate effectively by text—is a major signal of intelligence and credibility across these fields. “Official” knowledge always comes in the form of a text-based PDF document; resources and status are distributed to authors of texts which others reference. In his interesting paper “What is an Author?” Michel Foucault shows these dynamics at play in foundational discourses, such as Marxist thought and Freudian psychoanalysis, and how reference back to the author marks the beginning and end of these fields. While he argues that in modern science “the role of the author has disappeared as an index of truthfulness,” authorship credits still play a major role in science funding and opportunities. The same remains true in law and politics; Lina Khan, author of an influential article about platform monopolies, was tapped for the role of FTC chair.

A white paper is just a PDF is just a Microsoft Word document.

Yet, you won’t see any think tanks promoting their “new Microsoft Word document”.

Format and medium affect the legitimacy of ideas within them. Read my new essay here: https://t.co/9F88OQbhTO

1/n
— Samo Burja (@SamoBurja) January 6, 2021

These examples show the important role that authorship and crediting play in credibility at large in our social world. With this in mind, we can return to the questions we set out with: how might AI-generated text may change the uses and abuses of language in human society?

Venkat looks at this question in his new Ribbonfarm post Life After Language. From the premise that AI-based machine-to-machine communication will happen not via human language but via the efficient latent language of AI internal representations, Venkat makes some interesting speculations.

What about unmediated human-to-human communication? To the extent AIs begin to mediate most practical kinds of communication, what’s left for direct, unmediated human-to-human interaction will be some mix of phatic speech, and intimate speech. We might retreat into our own, largely wordless patterns of conviviality, where affective, gestural, and somatic modes begin to dominate.
Venkatesh Rao https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2023/05/04/life-after-language/

As evidence that this sort of paradigm shift in human communication is plausible, Venkat offers up the example of memes and reaction GIFs, a nonverbal vernacular which communicate an affect response to a post. McLuhan and Ong’s media scholarship give us another example: they show that before the rise of printed textuality, much of oral human communication took the form of parables and idiomatic “stock phrases” issued from a cultural canon. Neither of these media forms are thought of as being authored. If we are indeed at the beginning of a comparable transformation, as media theorists who prophesy the end of a “Gutenberg parenthesis” also claim, what role could authorship and discursive practice play in human coordination in general?

If textual crediting becomes deemphasized in favor of other sorts of human-to-human communication, we might ask how status, reputation, and credibility might be distributed. This brings me to two related ideas: credibility obtaining to online social communities, and credibility obtaining to lineages of practice.

Abstaining from valorizing individuals and attributing credit to a social community is the ideal of the “scenius.” In practice, it’s more common for reputational benefits to accrue to a few individuals, but other members may still be able to receive some of those benefits by affiliation with the scene. Historically, groups have used a single name to hack this effect, like the group of mathemeticians behind Nicholas Bourbaki. But some much larger internet communities today already share certain speech codes. To some degree, adopting certain subcultural speech codes already grants one legitimacy, at least within some communities. This is what seems to be happening with the rationalist community prepending every post with an “epistemic status,” and with the inscrutable, repetitive, manic vernacular of the Remilia / Milady community. Notably, Remilia ringleader Charlotte Fang is a vocal advocate of “post-authorship” practices. This refers to the fluid relationship Fang and his scene have with text of their own origin, text which is constantly recycled as copypasta for the neverending reply chains commonly posted by Milady avatar accounts. Fang says Milady is an “autonomous content farm;” the point is that the network itself becomes the author of all texts, and one is authenticated by posting in the vernacular style.

A second way of distributing credibility is participation in a community of practice. In communities defined by their work product, such as certain intellectual fields, martial arts, craft practices, and even industrialized trades like architecture, lineages of practice often serve as markers of legitimacy and authentication. In a world where text authorship is diminished in importance, lineage claims may serve a similar role that authorship claims do now. The declining fortunes of mistrusted institutions and the new focus on individuals (and their brands) a recovery of older authorship/invention practices, such as those where patrons of work receive authorial credit, or master-apprentice type relations. Kara points out that technical writings in craft guilds are the origin of modern ideas of intellectual property; what is a guild if not a social community, business, and lineage of practice all in one?

It’s curious to think about what types of dynamics might develop in education and training institutions when writing and authorship of texts no longer become a credibility signal. We are interested in how ideas of “originality” and “priority” have changed throughout different technological eras and how they operate in the context of lineages. Will authoring the first instance of an idea have value? Or will value be determined by which instance is most influential in scene or chain of ideas? In any case, the universality of the textual credibility model (I trust this written matter is a signal of human intelligence) must be replaced by other social forms of vetting.

This is where we see some of the important implications of our project this summer.

If you’re interested in following along, I recommend subscribing to the Other Internet newsletter on Substack. We’ll be publishing updates to the credit cultures project there, as well as events or get-togethers we’re doing as part of Summer of Protocols.

Life After Lifestyle

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 12:25:00 +0000

This essay debuted as a talk at FWB Fest in Idyllwild, California, 2022. I’ve rearranged and expanded the material for the essay version.

It is 2018 and I am on a flight to San Francisco. I am seated next to a harried woman who pays fifty dollars for WiFi and rattles out Slack messages. She is an employee of one of the largest digital agencies, and is clearly on her way to a client presentation. I can’t help but side-eye her screen as she edits a presentation deck. “Shipt isn’t just a delivery service,” she types in a large green sans-serif font. “It’s a super detailed, expert level, highly knowledgeable ideology.”

Shipt is a same-day grocery delivery business, an Instacart competitor owned by Target. It is a B2C company that provides a commodity service. Grocery delivery, an ideology?

On the one hand, it’s easy to laugh at consultants charging brands a hundred thousand dollars for a deck that says they should become a cult. But it’s another thing to acknowledge that brands today have real cultural power. This essay was first delivered as a talk at a festival by Friends With Benefits, a digital community that promotes cultural creation on web3. But where are FWB’s products? Instead, the culture seems to be the main thing, the product itself.

I’m going to argue that we are leaving one era and entering a new one, with new models for how culture is thought about and created, and new models for commerce, but also new critical questions, and greater moral challenges. But to understand these new models, we first need to know where we’re coming from, so I’m going to start with a retrospective. What were the 2010s?

Think back.

The Cultural Production Service Economy

The year is 2011. You just found out about Everlane.com. You order a blouse, an oxford. You browse on tumblr, scrolling through fuckyeahmenswear and photos of neatly arranged, squared Braun products. The year is 2014. You visit Carryology. You hear about Casper mattresses on the podcast Serial. Recession hipster culture is over, but its premium mediocre detritus is everywhere. The year is 2017. You are a creative with a liberal arts degree. You work at a direct to consumer brand. Like every company you are starting a blog. You learn about content marketing. You go to a pop-up museum filled with balloons. You take pictures for the gram. Product photos are beautiful. Sophisticated. Shot at an isometric angle. It’s the new “lean luxury.” You buy coffee from Blue Bottle. The year is 2019. You order your medication from Hims and Hers. You and your friends want to launch a pop-up brand for the weekend. You go on Alibaba and find blank t-shirts then spend the weekend slapping together a logo and some graphics. The year is 2022. You go to a workout class at the Bala store. You do yoga inside its sculpted pastel interior, like being inside of an Instagram advertisement. It feels like every aspect of your life could live in this world. Delightfully packaged, seamless, products that elevate all of your activities to a luxury branded experience.

The 2010s is what I want to call the era of Lifestyle. You know what it felt like, because you lived through it. And I did too. Since 2014 I have lived in New York, inside the machine where Lifestyle is made. Spending my waking moments moving through these branded experiences, I felt they they pointed to something I could say but not name.

Lifestyle was defined by three elements — brands, culture, and supply chain. The way these components were tied together by technology in the 2010s resulted in a particular organization of culture. To understand this model, we must look at each component in turn.

Let’s start with brands.

Via Bloomberg

Hot on the tails of the 2008 financial crisis and the housing crash came the Great Recession and Occupy movement. Graduates were entering a de-industrialized economy, a poor job market, and the double broken promises of affordable homeownership and a job guarantee for college graduates. But as Obama optimism ramped up and the economy began to recover under quantitative easing, a new wave of aspirational companies began to launch. This was the moment of Warby Parker, of Bonobos, of Birchbox. This was the era of the direct to consumer brand.

The overall brand promise of the DTC brand, “cutting out of the middle man,” can be seen as a reflexive response to the post-Occupy, anti-corporate sentiments that saturated the early part of the decade. The DTC moment was also driven by a renewed wave of startup enthusiasm. Fawning profile pieces peppered the media landscape, and the overall message emanating from the advertising, marketing, and investment worlds was: let’s not shop from these bloated multinationals; now we can buy from American entrepreneurs who are starting “disruptive,” tech-enabled, beautifully branded companies. In a way, the ubiquitous millennial marketing imagery also shares a political origin point: the Obama HOPE campaign, with its implicit promise that good design should play a role in our political lives. In the 2010s, companies like Gin Lane and Red Antler delivered dozens of DTC brand identities with solid pastel backgrounds, bold sans-serif typefaces, and aspirational imagery.

But the DTC brand is more than just an aesthetic; most importantly, DTC is a business model. The DTC goldrush began in earnest after the successes of the early Web 2.0 startups. By the early 2010s, Uber, Facebook, DoorDash, Instacart, Twitter had all become enormous platforms. And with their success, entrepreneurs were asking: how to “scale” other types of goods? And moreover, how to tap into this market of tech venture capital? At this time, the “X for Y” ethos was the most popular approach in fundraising. Uber for glasses, Uber for razors — this was the messaging on which many DTC companies were founded. If Uber could disrupt cabs and Twitter could disrupt the New York Times, why couldn’t Allbirds disrupt shoes?

Software engineers, like Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart, were leaving their jobs to bring the venture-funded approach to consumer goods and services. DTC companies were hiring aggressively from tech to build out slick landing pages and elaborate data marketing engines. And as this wealth of knowledge moved from software to physical goods, we started to see a profusion of new brands. Stitch Fix, Quip, Peloton, Outdoor Voices, Glossier, Daily Harvest, the list goes on. It felt like every month some CPG category was getting relaunched with this new approach. The expansion of venture funding, itself a result of capital seeking returns outside the low-interest rate environment, was a critical component of DTC. These brands typically raised huge amounts over several rounds, and plowed most of the money into subway ads in major cities and paid digital marketing.

This also was an era of platforms. Before Stripe, you had to forge relationships with payment networks. Before Alibaba and Shopify, you had to think about logistics. Now with these platforms, it was becoming easier than ever to start a brand. As I wandered alone in Chinatown and the LES, where I lived, I encountered the colorfully branded physical outputs of platform integration. For every new subway ad featuring an online pharmacy and a nice monstera plant, there was a new pop-up skate shop soaking up the runoff of Supreme teens. HSWLD on Delancey, a dozen others lost to memory… Online, I browsed IJJI and v.soon and Anti-Social Social Club on my friend’s Tiny Clothing Stores Are.na channel, this selection a mere trickle of the dropshipped minibrand torrent. The full-on fashion/streetwear collision was happening, and in a post-hipster era where sellout culture was dead in the water, starting a brand could seem like an act of creative expression, or even an act of resistance.

With the minibrands and Big DTC in the air, I was wondering: what is it that makes people care about these objects? how is it that they have meaning for people, and what is this ineffable substance “hype?” How do these things that we call “brands” work?

This brings us to subculture.

This era was not just one of rapid commerce and blitzscaling brands. The subtext for this brand apocalypse was the way in which subcultures were rapidly proliferating, the way in which people were identifying and sorting themselves into these cultures using the internet.

A hundred years ago, when image creation and distribution was more constrained, commerce was arranged by class. You can conceive of it as a vertical model, with high and low culture, and magazines and product catalogs that represent each class segment. Different aspirational images are shown to consumers, and each segment aspires upward to the higher level.

But social media has created a mass ability to publish images and curate them. On Tumblr and Pinterest and Are.na, you can group images into categories and comment on them. Through cheaper, consumer-grade media production tools, ideas once restricted to the underground or the zine now have glossy indie magazines, self-burnt mixtapes, and dozens of dedicated websites. And the effect of all this has been to bust wide open the pandora’s box of subculture.

The world we live in is no longer dominated by a single class hierarchy. Today you have art, sport, travel, climbing, camping, photography, football, skate, gamer. Just outside the mainstream stuff, you have roleplayinggame culture, you have furry culture, you have indie music culture, you have graphic designers… You have “cores” and “waves” and completely invented subcultures bootstrapped off Tumblr curation—techwear, bloghouse, cottagecore, daddy’s girl, pro-anorexia girls, witch girls… if you were on Reddit or Tumblr at this time, it was hard not to feel the explosion of internet subcultural life forms.

Bourdieu would have it that class and specialized cultural knowledge are tightly coupled, but even this link has been broken by the subcultural explosion. In 2017 I was chatting on Twitter with incels who lived in their parents midwest basements and were better Deleuze scholars than most graduate students. Meanwhile, many high paid tech workers eschewed a traditional liberal arts education altogether. Mass culture itself has become a subculture — a sort of sideshow to the real action, the way that Joe Rogan, a mass culture icon, merely provides a stage for other subcultural phenomena, or the way that NPR-loving liberals are now identifiable as a very specific category, not the default. Class still exists, but there’s no longer just one aesthetic per class. Instead, “class” is expressed merely by price points that exist within consumer subcultural categories.¹

Understanding what culture was became my obsession for the next couple years. I wanted to understand how brands and subcultures are related. I read widely about social construction theory and learned about cults, and I tried to understand and analyze contemporary subcultures: skate, art theory, fitness, MAGA Trumpism. It seemed to me that you could understand cultures by analyzing their interconnected components. Cultures have their own language, objects, and knowledge; their own stories, aesthetics, practices, people, and places that all make sense together in a coherent way. They have behaviors they condone and reward, and behaviors they deem unworthy. And each has its own moral sensibility.²

A culture is a coherent system of these foundational elements. See footnote 2 for a further explanation.

As I tried to understand how “culture” is transmitted, I came to understand that in order to be a part of a culture, you have to learn to participate in these elements. That’s how a culture becomes part of your identity: you learn to use the language, you read the community lore online, you post photos with the same aesthetic, and you know you’re “fitting in” when you start to get reblogs. And naturally, you buy objects too. By the end of this journey towards “fitting in,” you can tell your own story of membership and identity in the community (Wenger & Lave, 1991). Yet it is also clear that a crucial element of participation is practice. You can cut your hair like a skater and dress like a skater, but if you can’t do an ollie you’re not a skater. You can buy testosterone enhancer and maca root powder, but if you don’t post your gains, are you really a bodybuilder? Subcultures have these practices, participatory elements that I call “central” to what they are.

What interested me was the way that different subcultures and brands were feeding off one another. Lifestyle brands and DTC needed to draw on these subcultural elements—they needed to be the products people buy in order to participate. And in the other direction, product imagery was beginning to play an important role in subcultural formation. In many subcultural categories, more specialized versions based around curation of goods had taken over. On Reddit, you’re not a hiker; instead, you are a consumer of Steep and Cheap, ultralight gear, and Smartwool. You’re no longer just into skincare, you use Glossier, Hanskin pore cleansing oil, and GOOPGLOW Morning Skin Superpowder. We even saw the rise of subcultures where the entire notion of participation is simply consumption. r/mechanicalkeyboards is the classic example, but it also applies to hypebeast culture, or to that Tumblr subculture of design heads who make their entire personality about owning Dieter Rams objects and Leica cameras.

The cultural logic of the 2010s is best represented by the starter pack meme. In the starter pack meme, classes of people are identified through oblique subcultural references and products they are likely to consume. Starter pack memes reverse engineer the demographic profile: people are composites of products they and similar people have purchased, identified through credit card data and internet browsing behavior tracked across the web. While Reddit communities for gear were self-organizing consumer subcultures from one direction, companies and ad networks were working toward the same goal from the other direction.

This brings us to our third important factor: supply chain.

The new luxury direct-to-consumer companies acted like it, but most weren’t the owners of their own manufacturing. Instead, they were forging relationships with overseas factories. Every time one of these companies would come to market, 2-3 months later you’d suddenly see a profusion of copycat brands. Casper originated the mattress in a box, but soon after you had Leesa, Tuft & Needle, and Saatva. Recess originated the fancy CBD seltzer, but soon after you had Upstate Elevator, CBD Living, Mad Tasty, Dram.

While companies like SHEIN and ZARA are known for the tight vertical integration that enables real-time, demand-aware manufacturing, API-ification has happened across the entire supply chain. Companies like CA.LA let you spin up up a fashion line as fast as you’d spin up a new Digital Ocean droplet, whether you’re A$AP Ferg or hyped NYC brand Vaquera. Across the board, brands and middleware were opening new supply chains, which then became accessible entrepreneurs targeting all sorts of subcultural plays. And with Shopify, Squarespace, and Stripe, you can open an online store and accept payments in minutes. Once the goods are readily available, everything becomes a distribution problem—a matter of finding a target demographic and making products legible to it.

The “last mile” of this supply chain was the rapidly growing influencer economy. Sponsorships and artist collaborations were key to subcultural DTC marketing. Dena Yago charts out the many permutations of the artist-brand “collab” in her article “Content Industrial Complex.” Among others, there is the brand-artist sponsorship, the content marketing advertorial in which brand and artist portray each other as aspirational, and “co-creation” initiatives like the Tom Sachs Nike shoes. The essence of each of these is the elevation of a product to the cultural plane by affiliation with the artist. Why is Levis collaborating with Snoop Dogg? Why is sheets company Buffy doing profiles of an artist loft in Bushwick? These artists are performing a kind of service for brands, lending their credibility and enabling the brands to “insert themselves into an existing cultural conversation.” All of these are various ways in which an artist’s work becomes branding. While the world of art and design is one subcultural vertical, these models have been applied to every category, from musicians to sports to streamers to business influencers.

We’re all used to sponsorships to some degree. But in the latter part of the 2010s, integration across the supply chain pushed subcultural branding to reach levels of weirdness. One of my favorite PDFs of all time is “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Watch” by artist Jenny Odell. The text charts her investigation of a so-called “free watch” on Instagram, back through advertisements, to Shopify plugins, then to Alibaba, unfolding a network of “automated brands” set up to market the same $1 watch through different subcultural styles, from ritzy to surfer to minimalist. Odell’s study of “uncanny ecommerce” reveals the exact way subcultural branding intersects with the supply chain. As Odell says, “it’s $29.99 because a certain person is wearing it on Instagram; it’s $29.99 because it’s photographed next to flannel and a Chemex.” A series of brands made entirely out of code, there is no there there.

Or maybe you’ll remember the episode of MrBeast Burger. In November 2020, the popular YouTube streamer Mr. Beast launched his eponymous burger chain in all 50 states at once. How did he manage this incredible feat? The website has the answer, describing “MrBeast Burger” as a “virtual brand offering a separate concept to run out of your kitchen.” Except for a couple concept stores, the vast majority of MrBeast Burgers are run out of a network of preexisting restaurants kitchens that use the Olo ordering and delivery software. MrBeast Burger is not even a company unto itself; it is a child company of Virtual Dining Concepts, a service that creates delivery-only celebrity culinary brands.

Across food, across fashion and accessories, legal cannabis products, beverages, athleisure, skin care, supplements, and other permutations of consumer packaged goods and apparel, every manufacturing and last-mile strategy has become possible, from dropshipping to just-in-time, from small-batch to make-on-demand. Products begin their life as an unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post. Each step, a service rendered that turns a commodity into a cultural item, turning the logic of all manufacturing into this: your brand, our products.

This is peak Lifestyle.

Easier than ever to launch a brand. More goods than ever. Software-enabled, integrated supply chain driven business models. An explosion of online social media cultures. These elements have become omnipresent, splashed across our lives like the patterned splotches of a magic eye book. Stare long enough, and you begin to see the whole: an economy where culture is made in service of brands. To be even more literal: cultural production has become a service industry for the supply chain.

The cultural production service economy (CPSE) isn’t about a single company, nor is it a strategy. It is an entire arrangement of culture, production, and finance, it is the way things are right now. It would be more accurate to say that the CPSE is a configuration of the entire social order.³ What Dena Yago terms the “vibe economy,” in a mouthwateringly short but brilliant series of insights, is another illustration of this “social order” based way of seeing.

The vibe economy is a collectively-oriented evolution in lifestyle— those that produce and purvey it manufacture scarcity, and one of the defining aspects is the viewing of consumer goods as investment assets where one can extract social capital or financial capital. Sneakers and apparel exist to be bought and resold via the entire experiential and pseudo-museuological culture complex that has formed around streetwear. What makes hypebeast culture different from the post-recession version of lifestyle as we know it is that aspirational, socially mediated lifestyle is about individual comparison and distinction, without an aspect of collective mood-making or participatory moments.
Dena Yago <a href="https://appliedarts.mirror.xyz/Cq5e2QGJl6zoCGzRVAWSxrbYUgKwtCEeZke1JojIXNE</a>

The vibe economy, as Dena indicates, is an intermediary step between Lifestyle and what comes next. Charting it out is a story for another day. But before stepping into the world that comes after the CPSE, I want to emphasize that viewing the world in terms of the configuration of the social order has great explanatory power. Seeing the cultural production service economy helps us understand why, for a decade, “now” has felt increasingly sophisticated but empty. It’s why, in the absence of something real to aspire to in 2010s culture, everything has become vaguely aspirational, even sugar water. As more and more young people enter into entertainment careers in a de-industrialized “creator economy,” business models supported by brand affiliation reign supreme. Once the CPSE eats a category, it can be segmented a dozen, a hundred times, filling out every price point and segment. Class mobility may be shot, but at least we can have nice things.

Unlimited availability and optionality among consumer goods has staged the final competitive battleground in the space of immaterial value, where there is no ceiling on “cultural value add” managers can jazz up a product with. Is it any surprise that brands want to become culture itself?

Chris Beiser, personal correspondence

From Making Goods to Making Culture

I want to offer some reflections on this story of the 2010s. The essence of the cultural production service economy is that brands want to draw on these rich veins of subculture. But the way they’re doing so has become institutionalized, and in fact productized, by audience retargeting solutions and influencer sponsorship marketplaces. So much so that you could reframe this CPSE as a sort of generalized culture-washing.

Now, “culture-washing” was the subject of Naomi Klein’s famous book, No Logo, which both captured and galvanized a zeitgeist of anti-corporate, anti-globalization activists in the 90s. Naomi Klein’s subject was the multinationals—big companies like Annheiser-Bush, Nike, Apple, Roots, and Coca-Cola. Klein claimed that through expansive branded “experiences” and parasitic sponsorships of cultural institutions, brands eat away at both public space and private selfhood. For Klein, a “loss of space happens inside the individual; it is a colonization not of physical space but of mental space.” Jenny Odell’s wonderful book How To Do Nothing echoes this critique. Today it seems like Klein’s fears have been realized in the fullest possible way: in the cultural production service economy, all culture is made in service of for-profit brands, at every scale and size.

But Klein isn’t able to account for something key. Why are people attracted to these sorts of branded experiences in the first place?

Celebration, FL, via The Daily Beast.

First of all, European and American commentators of all political stripes recognize the current cultural moment as one that is stuck in some way. Endless remakes and reboots, endless franchises, cinematic universes, and now metaverses filled with brands who talk to each other; a culture of nostalgia with no real macro narrative. And there is a second common story, one about the decline of religion and the disappearance of civic culture in the US. While America used to be known for its rich culture of voluntary associations, Robert Putnam showed in his book Bowling Alone that these aspects of American life have deteriorated. Beyond our workplaces, what else is stepping in to provide a sense of community and belonging?

Internet-spawned subcultures are clearly providing one answer. And if so, it makes sense that people look to subculture-affiliated brands as part of their meaning-making journey. This is why I always thought that a common popular line of critique, “people consume brands to form their identity”, was silly. Of course they do! People are always seeing and being seen, and in some ways, owning products does constitute one form of cultural participation. Yet it is also clear that owning goods alone is not a really significant sort of participation. No matter how great the list of product recommendations in your favorite nootropics or skincare subreddit, the practices and the moral premises of a subculture always are deferred when put in company hands. Deferred in the way that buying the hottest running shoes don’t mean you’re fit. Deferred in the way that buying books from Verso isn’t an adequate expression of the leftist values it signals. Deferred in the way that buying Patagonia doesn’t mean you “leave no trace” when camping.

So to me, the problem is not with the buying, nor even with the culture-grifting of brands, but with some kind of insufficiency on the part of the companies themselves. If the meanings they have on offer are starved versions of cultural membership, then perhaps, I started to feel, the brands aren’t going far enough. Could we imagine a version of a branded subculture that was both nonextractive and meaningful?

As I struggled with these thoughts early on, I wanted to explore what it would mean for brands and subcultures to merge more fully, to offer a much deeper and richer meaning. This set me on a quest to learn about cults. I read about organizations which were abusive and manipulative, but which still managed to create meaningful practices that weren’t just based on commerce.

In 2018, I tested some of these ideas in a format I called “Cult Design Workshop,” in which I offered attendees a business model canvas type of template to build out a pitch deck for a whole cultural system. The idea was that my cultist participants had to think holistically, not just about products and brand symbols, but about the practices, the stories, the people and places and rituals. This wouldn’t be a brand that just points to a subculture, but an entire subculture in and of itself. We examined classic cults like Heaven’s Gate, but also things like guru Tony Robbins as case studies. In 2019 I did another workshop at Refactor Camp, exploring the difference between brands and religions. Modeled after the “horseshoe theory of politics,” a daft pop political theory which claims that the far left and right resemble one another, I introduced the “horseshoe theory of brands.” This was a similarly blunt instrument, attempting to show that brands and religions might look similar at the extreme ends of devotee attachment. By adding my cultural components—practices, stories, and so forth—brands could become more meaningful, approaching even sacredness.

These projects landed in a zeitgeist screaming for meaning and community. Tiktok and Tumblr witches were hovering about, and the astrology resurgence was in full force. Peak Goop, peak Jordan Peterson. Redpills, “tribalism,” and online radicalization were featured in the media regularly. And as my story about the Shipt “ideology” indicates, brand strategists were also picking up on these cues. Sweater company Naadam had its “cult of cashmere” campaign. Basics brand Entireworld went to market with bizarrely culty uniformed cuddle puddle imagery. And then of course, there was LOT2046, the all-black subscription based service which distributed a basic set of clothing, footwear, essential self care products, and media content. In many ways LOT was a real cult and not a brand, and on this I’ll just say if you know you know.

The posturing of DTC brands as cults reveals an impasse. People are looking for more meaningful narratives and communities than brands can offer, and companies want to supply this “meaning demand”—but are structurally disincentivized to do so. Today, “brand values” and “activations” that are the closest brands get to living up to their subcultural affiliation. The gold standard for corporate cultural participation was Red Bull Music Academy, a branded cultural institution which over two decades became a legitimately respected music and arts organization. But it’s difficult to find a single other example that lives up to RBMA. Nike offers local “run clubs,” but so infrequently that they can only be seen as mere brand marketing. DTC goods companies of all sorts feature female artists on company blogs, but not support artists financially in any way. All in all, product marketing businesses can only do so much to situate their goods in these broader cultural worlds without eating into their margins.

This seemingly insurmountable gap is what my workshops were trying to address. But what would it mean for brands to stop pointing to culture, and to start being it? To do so, they would have to go far beyond marketing, to offer meaningful modes of participation. Is it even possible for companies to be in service of something greater than themselves?

Actual subcultural membership has something more to offer. To be a hiker means participating in a culture of respect and awe for the outdoors. It involves moral injunctions like leaving no trace, practices that involve taking care of the earth like shitting far away from fresh water. And of course, what it means to be in religion is to share in a spiritual, moral world together, to strive for a recognition of something higher than ordinary living.

While the wack lifestyle brands may not be able to get there, other companies have been moving this direction, evolving formal properties that make them look more like full subcultures. Companies like Crossfit and Soulcycle create a sense of consistent space and ritual that inculcate deep loyalty and community among their participants. Reimagine, an organization that describes itself as “the world’s leading end-of-life events platform,” hosts paid gatherings and festivals related to death and healing. Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston’s landmark report “How We Gather” explored organizations like these, which do more than business for their customers; they also answer spiritual questions of personal transformation, community, and purpose-finding. This isn’t even to mention the rise of hugely popular “mindfulness” apps like Calm. Even LOT2046, through its livestreams and intimate founder monologues, managed to create a feeling of rare community, connection, and spiritual aliveness. A VC I talk with occasionally once gave me his own assessment of the cultural moment. “The obvious opportunity,” he said, “is to build a new religion.”

After the DTC era, brands have become present in every part of our lives, ambient, diffuse, meaning things to us. Sports, music, health, sleep, and person-to-person communication have become interpenetrated with brands. We all know that blue iMessage bubbles mean luxury conversation. Is luxury spirituality so absurd?

These thoughts have always been discomforting. Over time, I have reached more conviction that truly meaningful “branded subculture” is not only possible, not only inevitable, but in fact preferable to the status quo. Yet I know that is exactly what the marketers reading this want to hear. I’ve feared that talking about this is might encourage companies to do what they’re already doing better. More than culture-washing, religion-washing.

Jia Tolentino has this brilliant yet frustratingly inconclusive gonzo lifestyle investigation of the athleisure brand Outdoor Voices, which has adopted the slogan “Doing Things”. After spending time with the cofounder and visiting several athletic activities sponsored and organized by OV, she has this to say: “I went to a yoga class, wearing one of my OV outfits, before catching my flight back to New York. I had never been less able to distinguish what was good from what was profitable.” If my investor friend had his way, every brand would give you this feeling. But I share Jia’s feeling of ambivalence about the outcomes of large-scale intentional culture-crafting. Fuck a cultlike brand—what we have to ask is whether a venture-funded brand-designed culture would be any good. Because making culture is about more than making music and making graphic design: it’s about making people.

The origin of the term “culture” is best documented by the comparative literature scholar Raymond Williams, who charted its appearance in his book Culture and Society, 1780-1950. At the beginning of the 18th century, “culture” was still only a verb. It meant to cultivate the land, to encourage natural growth: the culture of leeks or potatoes or gardens. But inevitably, the term was applied to mean the “cultivation” of the social conditions for a healthy society.

The 18th and 19th century saw rapid upsets to the traditional ways of life, from the French Revolution and the controversial rise of democracy as a powerful ideology, to early manufacturing industries and changes in commercial land in Britain. Millions were left impoverished and landless, or reduced many to what elites saw as “mechanized” human beings in the factories. These trends caused British intellectuals to envision corrective measures to the wrongs of industrialism. The era saw rich debates among British elites about how to respond to the crises of poverty and moral destitution. **Some thought that the elites, a spiritual aristocracy, should define and emphasize the highest values at which society should aim. Others, inspired by the French Revolution, envisioned democratic reform driven by the people. Many disagreed on the role of the Church. But all recognized the need for the betterment of civilization as the modern nation state emerged; all shared a common concern with the type of society, the type of people that industrialism was producing.

A pivotal figure in these debates was Matthew Arnold, a 19th century education reformer and anti-elitist. He believed it was the responsibility of the state, not the aristocracy, to set educational standards. “The State”, he wrote, “has an interest in the primary school as a civilising agent.” It was Arnold who turned “culture” from a verb into a noun. Arnold’s “culture” would be a pursuit of perfecting our “stock notions and habits” which he and his contemporaries feared would become mechanical and unthinking if left to the new commercial society. Culture is a process, with the end result of shaping human minds. Arnold’s writing is unequivocal on this point:

Consider these people then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds.

Arnold was concerned to mould these things toward the pursuit of humanistic perfection. He envisioned national culture, quite explicitly, as a secular replacement for religious virtues. And his reforms were largely successful, with his promotion of “culture” playing an influential role in the expansion of state-funded education and school taxes.

All governments will invariably seek to implant the “right kind of idea” in the minds of those they govern. But what Arnold spoke into being was a powerful moral justification for doing so in a newly secularizing political world. What I take away from this story is a contradiction: while Arnold was nominally an anti-elitist acting in good faith, he was willing to tolerate a basic division between “the masses” and a group of people who were to create this culture, to educate these minds, and to create right action. Since Arnold, politicians and government leaders have always understood culture as their tool for producing a type of society, with types of people. As Raymond Williams says declaratively: “The idea of the masses, and the technique of observing certain aspects of mass-behaviour […] formed the natural ideology of those who sought to control the new system and to profit by it.” For better or worse, Arnold’s idea of culture is not a democratic one—it is controlling.

In 2022, the term “culture” has taken on an unquestionable positive moral valence. Along with the veneration of “creators,” “creating culture” has become impossible to disagree with, and the word “community” is blessed with a similar halo of virtue. Some companies have made this the core of their brand positioning. Cultural creation is, for example, a pillar of projects like web3 creative community Friends With Benefits, or Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler’s new company, Metalabel. The triviality with which these words are deployed belie the seriousness of their origin point. “Culture” may be used to refer to “tradition” (as in “other cultures”), or it may be used to refer to the vicissitudes of music and art trends, but it is neither of these things: “culture” is a social engineering project.

Today, social media has become a more perfect tool for culture than Arnold could have imagined, and its use a science of penetrating the mass mind. All communication now approaches propaganda, and language itself has become somebody else’s agenda. Little neutral ground remains outside of this “economy economy.”

It’s curious that appending the word “economy” another word to make a phrase, as in “experience economy,” lsharing economy,” and “passion economy” is largely a rhetorical device used a to signal the phrase-coiner’s interest in financial gain and indicate an investable category
— Toby (@tobyshorin) September 24, 2020

For those who wish to fashion culture for others, be they brands or DAOs or governments, there is no escape from this economy of influence, nor from the stakes.

Life After Lifestyle

Now we know what culture is. So it is finally time to talk about the way that new cultures are being made, and how this has changed from the lifestyle era. The social order is reconfiguring once again, and we are all shaping it in some way.

We are still living under the cultural production service economy. The supply chains are still online, streaming goods of every variety from China and Indonesia and Turkey and Vietnam to the United States. But in a key way, the logic of Lifestyle is inverting.

The Lifestyle era was not about creating culture; it was about attaching brands onto existing cultural contexts. It was not about shaping people; it was about sorting consumer demographics into niche categories. The new order we are entering into reverses this. For some organizations, culture has become the product itself, and products have become secondary, auxiliary, to the production of culture.

Here is a simple case from the current outdoors craze happening in France, courtesy of my internet friend Romain Coste. Triple Sphere Hiking Club is a branded hiking and backpacking society. It has a logo, t-shirts, zines—everything you might expect from a lifestyle era brand. But Triple Sphere Hiking Club is is not a product business, or a brand activation of an outdoors gear company like Salomon. It started and remains a community: an excuse to get people together, to be in company and to perform the practice of hiking. There are a dozen similar groups in sporting scenes of all types, and some of them have grown enough to obtain brand partnerships or collaborations.

In the old world of broadcast communication that Naomi Klein wrote about, promotion was limited to a few channels, so multinationals with massive advertising budgets had the power to sell a brand monoculture. Now every night, on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, we scroll and see brands smushed up next to real people in the feed. Branding altogether has become more personal—now, you create your own interpretation of a subculture. As a consumer, you subscribe to one vision or another: what’s your version of hiking out doors? What type of vibe are you about? Purist? Gorpy? High intensity? Meditative? But in all cases, the branded subculture itself is the main thing, while the role of physical goods is diminished. Their job is not to drive value, but to add another layer of depth to the community, to enshrine the practices. In the case of larger corporate partnerships, the audience for the products does not have to be pieced together from various demographics; it is the participants in the already-existing branded subculture.

These miniature community brands showcase how the CPSE is being extended and built on top of, rather than superseded entirely. The countless skate brands of the last decade, more often than not just a few homies throwing screenprinted tees onto an online storefront, can be seen as early versions of this form of subcultural interpretation. But other branded entities go much further, equipping subcultural development with powerful revenue models.

Bitcoin and Ethereum in their early days are paradigmatic examples. When you bought Bitcoin and Ether, it’s with the knowledge that there was also a culture there to become part of. Now years later, there are many tribes to “buy into,” from Bitcoin Christians to Bitcoin carnivores, from Ethereum permissionless free market maxis to Ethereum self-organizing collective decentralized coop radicals. Even if none of these appeal to you, you still end up becoming what “the space” (crypto’s collective term for itself) calls a “crypto person.” The creation of more and more “crypto people” is driven by the new revenue model cryptocurrencies exhibit. The business logic of these tokens is “number go up,” a feat accomplished by getting as many people to buy the token as possible. In other words, the upside opportunity is achieved with mass distribution of Bitcoin and Ethereum culture—the expansion of what it means to be an ETH holder into new arenas and practices. Buyers become evangelists, who are incentivized to promote their version of the subculture.

Evangelism is a critical term for understanding this new cultural logic. While “communities” may be the term that these organizations use to describe themselves, they are frequently rich with explicit spiritual content.

The founders of Soul Cycle have a new company called “Peoplehood.” Peoplehood is a relational group practice, similar to Circling or its more older cousin, group psychotherapy. It delivers the community and bonding that people came to Soul Cycle for, minus the exercise bike. In a recent interview, founder Julie Rice said “we realized that connection should be its own product. We are modern medicine for the loneliness epidemic.” This is a brand that is about the practices and beliefs. Peoplehood describes the studios where they “scale human experience” as “digital and physical sanctuaries.” Is this a class about human connection, or a Quaker meeting room?

Then there’s Effective Altruism. EA began as a generalization for a number of organizations, some growing out of the rationalist community, others focused on evidence-based charity, and others promoting the idea of “giving what we can.” But as isms are wont to do, this blanket term has become the thing itself: now you can identify as an Effective Altruist. EA promotes policies that are modernized versions of tithing, based on moral philosopher Peter Singer’s notion of impartial giving. Adherents are encouraged to give away at least 10% of their wealth to the most impactful, underprioritized, and long-termist cause areas. EA’s relationship with rationalism has made it popular in the tech community, boasting a growing number of high net worth founders among its proponents. EA, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, is a sort of headless brand; because it is a philanthropic approach, it attracts wealth by design, and its network effects are growing. With its focus on existential AI risk as a chief cause area, EA even has an eschatology—a theory of the end of the world. As far as newly designed cultures go, EA is the closest thing we have to a new religion.

Let me summarize the differences one more time.

In the 2010s, supply chain innovation opened up lifestyle brands. In the 2020s, financial mechanism innovation is opening up the space for incentivized ideologies, networked publics, and co-owned faiths. Liquid cryptocurrency tokens empower speculative cultural projects with monetary policies that create FOMO (e.g. Ethereum, FWB); NFTs enable membership and monetization of whole aesthetics (e.g. Milady, Nouns). Time will only tell how crypto’s forays into urban planning will change the nature of civic cultural identity, but in the meantime, some people choose to directly subscribe to digital communities that supersede the neighborhood, sending a stream of payments their chosen site of belonging (e.g. LOT2046, The Nearness).

Under CPSE models, companies brand products. They point to subcultures to justify the products’ existence, and use data marketing to sort people into starterpack-like demographics. Subcultures become consumerized subcultures, composed of products. In the new cultural economy, the culture is the product. It is composed of practices, ideas, and discourses. Products are auxiliary, supportive, but not the main event. And most importantly, people now opt into these designed cultures with full knowledge and awareness that these cultures might change who they are. The authenticity-driven culture of ironic detachment, so present in the early 2000s, has given way to a moment where people are genuinely open to being influenced, open to sincerely participating, even if it’s cringe.

Once upon a time I wrote the following sentences.

Yet now, as Dena Yago says, “you can like both Dimes and Doritos, sincerely and without irony.” If we no longer see brands and commodity capitalism as something to be resisted, we need more nuanced forms of critique that address how brands participate in society as creators and collaborators with real agency. Interest in working with brands, creating brands, and being brands is at an all-time high. Brands and commodities therefore need to be considered and critiqued on the basis of the specific cultural and economic contributions they make to society. People co-create their identities with brands just as they do with religions, communities, and other other systems of meaning. This constructivist view is incompatible with popular forms of postmodern critique but it also opens up new critical opportunities. We live in a time where brands are expected to not just reflect our values but act on them. Trust in business can no longer be based on visual signals of authenticity, only on proof of work.
Toby Shorin https://subpixel.space/entries/after-authenticity/

These words conclude my essay After Authenticity. It took me about a year to write that essay. I started it trying to understand why the idea of “authenticity” was no longer relevant, and ended it discovering moral theory. Authenticity, I came to understand, was more than a culture of irony and suspicion of everything commercial culture has to offer. It drew on a deep moral source that runs through our culture, a stance of self-definition, a stance of caring deeply about the value of individuality.

But through the research and writing, I managed to convince myself of something genuinely surprising. If authenticity culture was being eroded—by the paradox of its own scale, by internet cultures built on togetherness, by memes and Likes and whole way the internet turns attention into shared value—then it may be the case that the deeper moral source may also be undergoing a paradigmatic transformation. If people could unironically like brands now, maybe in the near future they would be comfortable opting into a culture premised on collectivity, rather than individualism. Perhaps they would be ok letting someone convince them of what is good, what a right way of life is. Perhaps they would no longer feel the urge to become unique. Perhaps they would find home and belonging in sameness, or even, I thought, faith.

This essay has taken nearly six. When I wrote my first ideas down in 2016, I thought it would take decades for businesses to bridge the impasse of living up to their stated “brand values” with meaningful ongoing practices, and come closer to the subcultures they grifted on. But in the intervening years, I’ve seen things that have changed my mind. Fandoms tens of thousands strong organize to worship pop idols. Founders broadcast their ambitions to create new cities and nations founded on moral premises. On TikTok, global networks of people share ritualistic practices, from body movement to prayer. Cryptocurrency alone has drastically accelerated what I thought would come, furnishing subcultures with powerful financial mechanisms.

I have occasionally been asked why I’m obsessed with brands. The answer is that brands are things made out of belief. They are amorphous *meanings* that structure our relationships; they are already the same sort of thing that a religion or a culture is. With the cultural production service economy, and now with cryptocurrencies, all of the ingredients for social transformation, not to say upheaval, are in place. We are transitioning out of the era of Lifestyle, and into an era where the production of culture is valued—both subjectively and financially—on its own terms. From an era where brands are designed to sell products to an era where brands are designed to be culture, to transform lives, to instill beliefs.

While I started as a bystander, I can no longer claim to be a neutral observer of these developments. Thinking and writing about these issues has brought me into conversation and collaborative partnership with people who are working on large-scale cultural engineering projects. Nadia Asparouhova, independent researcher and author of the book Working in Public, has been advocating for what she calls idea machines: “self-sustaining organisms that contain all the parts needed to turn ideas into outcomes.” She hopes to see a renaissance of new philanthropic initiatives as big as Effective Altruism, with a vast array of creative and optimistic social agendas. Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, is building a new company called Metalabel. According to Yancey, labels are startups for culture: exist to promote a specific aesthetic, region, or point of view, to fund, distribute, and promote culture of one kind or another.

Nadia Asparouhova, Idea Machines Diagram

My role in these and other projects has been very small. But I keep ending up in rooms with people who want to seed new -isms into the world. It’s hard to know what impact I’ve had, but through these collaborations and friendships, my own agenda is becoming more clear. For one, I think it’s healthy to share my ambivalence; only from a place of sobriety can we act with full responsibility. And secondly, I find myself encouraging people to stay away from being meta. As enthusiastic as I am about more tech wealth pouring into cultural initiatives, the regranting programs that are now so popular are just like software platforms: they outsource your own agency to some imagined future actors. I keep asking people to get more specific about the culture they’d like to see. What do you think it would be good if there was more of? What do you wish people were spending more of their time on? Instead of building a culture-agnostic platform, can you find a way to support that? To encourage that?

The further from goods and services you go, the closer you get to ideology and belief. If it’s the case that the goods and services are a means to a different end rather than the other way around, the question is: what are you leading your subscribers towards?

As founders, community leaders, and shapers of these new cultures, this is the most important question we have to ask. Because we’ve seen that we’re not only creating culture: we’re producing personality in people. In other words, we’re creating types of guys.

we've replaced cultural zeitgeists with types of guys and I think that's beautiful
— alice maz (@alicemazzy) December 17, 2021

The realization that producing culture is about producing types of personhood is the central issue of this new cultural economy. Systems of belief are sticky, compelling. Culture can be generational. This is both the opportunity and the risk.

In the most cynical version of this new world, culture designers are inculcating types of guy who are profitable. The customer lifetime value of a believer is potentially far greater than a user. Founders could easily design a culture with bells and whistles, upsell opportunities, and a permanent model of extraction. Here we approach something like David Phelps’ reductive view of religion as gamification: cultures designed in the image of medieval Catholicism, with its marketplace for indulgences. Moral worth is equated with how much you are able to spend on salvation. Or worse, we could see a boom of dangerous new age cults like NEXIVM or Aum Shinrikyo.

In the best version of this world, culture designers are inculcating people who are caring, giving, and selfless, or who take action to improve the world and the lives of those around them in some ways. Encouraging practices that are lifegiving and loving and meaningful on their own merit. EA, to its credit, has something to admire here. The judge of a subculture is not its stated axioms, but the type of people who identify as its members.

Yancey says that metalabels are like startups for “any kind of cultural project: from art to activism to community projects to efforts to establish new points of view.” But a record label like Factory Records is very different than an activist group like Extinction Rebellion. XR promotes culture of a fundamentally different sort. The knowledge they share is awareness of climate disasater, the people are leaders and participants, the places are government centers where activism takes place, and the practices are demonstrations and nonviolent civil disobedience. You may not agree with Extinction Rebellion’s approach, or even its premise, but you cannot deny that it is qualitatively different than a record label, and that its purpose is somehow higher. If Extinction Rebellion is creating culture, it is inculcating a “type of person” who cares about something greater than him or herself, and who takes action in service of all beings.

Friends With Benefits, the crypto x culture community, is a final intriguing case study. FWB began with a set of well known figures—Trevor McFedries, Chuck “NoPattern” Anderson, Holly Herndon—and attracted likeminded members. It throws music events and parties, the practices, and it promotes a different way of thinking about crypto and culture. Its canon is Squad Wealth, it shares in the stories of its legendary musician members, and it creates knowledge for how to monetize creative works, while also providing an audience for those works. While it does have some brand collaborations, like the FWB Taika coffee, it has the token-based business model of expanding belief. Recently, FWB threw its first physical festival at Idyllwild Arts Academy, an arts high school in the San Jacinto mountains, with events ranging from this essay, to conversations about mental health, to legendary designers talking about NFTs, to James Blake DJ sets, to Kei Kreutler’s mind-expanding discourse on mnemotechnics. That a single community has gathered such an influential set of culture-makers is already an achievement. But the type of person that FWB encourages its members to become is still an open question.

While FWB’s primary home is a Discord server, a FWB has a notion of “neighborhoods” and local engagement in the cities they operate in. Perhaps in the future FWB will extend its culture to new types of civic participation or mutual aid. Of course, there’s always room for “culture” that is simply there to entertain, enthrall, to get lost in the resonance of music and art, and to have fun. But FWB’s outsized influence and undercurrent of sincerity makes me hope it will grow deeper roots wherever it touches down on IRL land.

In my 20s, I felt we had no choice but to surf the endless floodwaves of digital cultures. But with things like QAnon, we’ve seen that creating culture doesn’t always lead to good outcomes. Wrestling with this topic has brought me realize I can not be agnostic to cultural acceleration. I have become much more curious about what the great religions of the world have to teach us. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism—they are not perfect, but they offer extraordinary wisdom about what practices of belonging, charity, compassion, and good conduct look like. My organization, Other Internet, advises a new religious community called The Nearness. Incorporated as a cooperative, it is a subscription service that takes people on four 10-week pathways over the course of a year, teaching on a variety of themes such as “deepening your spirituality” or “your relationships,” while teaching practices of prayerful reflection, journaling, and meditation. But the “doctrine” here is simply a modernized adaptation of existing Judeochristian sources. And arguably, if Kanye succeeds in his massive cultural engineering project, his music, housing, and apparel will become portals to Christian life.

Starting a community is hard. Starting a religious organization—an ideology, a monastic order, a church, a ministry—is harder. I won’t pull punches: tech founders and D2C brand builders are not yet prepared to operate communities that are first and foremost spaces of moral influence. The founders of the Nearness, Casper ter Kuile and Alec Gerwitz, might be. One is a divinity school graduate and both have spent years in faith communities. But over in EA and adjacent Rationalist spaces, we hear about drama, allegations of abuse, and sentiments that EA can be dehumanizing. Even psychologically healthy people can power trip when they become perceived as leaders. No matter our measure of traditional success, without effort dedicated to our own emotional and spiritual development, founders like you and I risk becoming hubristic and manipulative when put in positions of moral authority. Professional psychologists undergo years of training and therapy before they can open their own practice. How do culture designers learn how to make their sacred spaces safe and nourishing?

So many of these new communities are formed online first. I wonder about ways they can tap into rich veins of existing culture, to ground themselves in the bodies of knowledge, ways of being, and memory practices that have already outlasted us. This firm ground may be a much older bedrock of belief, or it may be the local food systems that give us life, or it may be the histories of places we make our physical homes. By accepting that these newly designed cultures are meaningful to us, we have already gone beyond the idea of “real” versus “fake”, or “authentic” versus “inauthentic” culture. Yet tradition is something different, handed down through mediums of memory, by opening up to which we transcend reason and find communion with those who have come before and will come after us.

I’ve shown you the model. But I’m also showing you the new questions it opens, and encouraging us all to act from a place of understanding the stakes. For the last decade, it has been hard to imagine a world outside of the cultural production service economy. But we are leaving branded lifestyles behind, and stepping into a new world of belief, faith, and meaning. What types of culture is worth creating? What types of people do we want to become? Whether as founder, stewards, leaders, lurkers, diehards, or members, it is we who will shape and be shaped by these new cultures of belief. The culture is now the product. But it’s a product of us.

Thank you to my friends, peers, and contemporaries whose brilliance shaped these ideas over the years. I am deeply indebted to Darren Kong for his realization that cultural production becomes a service economy, and for countless conversations in 2017 and 2018 that helped form the foundation. I am equally indebted to Dena Yago, always a model and inspiration, and now friend and collaborator. And I am equally indebted to Aaron Lewis for his deep intellectual partnership, and for pulling on that thread with me. In no particular order, I am grateful to Betty Wang, Jake Naviasky, Jimmy Young, Bryan Lehrer, Libby Marrs, Brenden Savi, Hugh Francis, Kei Kreutler, John Palmer, Yancey Strickler, Carson Salter, Drew Austin, Casper ter Kuile, Chris Beiser, Ankur Sharma, Kara Kittel, Nadia Eghbal, Laura Lotti, Max Niederhofer, Alex Zhang, Jose Meija, Sam Hart, Yatú Espinosa, Tiger Dingsun, Tom Critchlow, and to my brother Kyle Shorin. Special thanks to Alex Zhang and FWB for many enlightening conversations and for giving me the stage to share these ideas for the first time. Special gratitude to Patrick Steadman and Edouard Urcades for co-creating the first iteration of Cult Design Workshop, and to Jake Hobart for the “Our Brand. Your Products” image. Thanks and filial piety to my internet aunt and uncle, Sarah Perry and Venkatesh Rao. Eternal thanks to Other Internet Peer Review, Learning Gardens, and the Lore Zone.

The tangle of contemporary fashion signifiers resists aesthetic categorization altogether, which is why I say that price point, rather than quality of material or manufacture, is the only possible determinant of class. In other words, people really do be paying $565 for Balenciaga Crocs. ↩
I will refer to this model throughout this piece as “components of culture,” although in my previous work, I sought to generalize “culture” to “systems of meaning.” These compositional elements are present to varying degrees in every culture, and each element supports each other element in multifacted ways. For example, we can examine the relationship between narratives and artifacts. Narratives give historical, shared meaning to objects. Through a narrative, an object is located in a story that communicate its history, importance, use value, and appropriate methods of use (c.f. practices). As for the artifact, it makes the narrative concrete by allowing it to be invoked by a physically apprehensible object. If the narrative contains moral lessons or some emotional valence, the object may come to evoke those morals or emotions. The artifact can also metonymously refer to the entire myth, as the the Holy Cross found dangling from a link of rosary beads links to story of the crucifixion. An artifact may be used to initiate a ritual retelling of the narrative (again, practices). And each storytelling again re-inscribes the meanings and value of the artifact. It’s possible to go on further; the relationship is endless. Each pair of cultural primitives exhibits this mutuality. Think of the relationship between narratives and aesthetics, aesthetics and discourses, knowledge and practices. Imagining specific examples, we find they fold into one another. Each dyad also implicates other cultural primitives, like how practices are implicated in the relationship between narratives and artifacts. The play between these relationships, as they are carried out by groups of people, form the texture of a living culture. ↩
To briefly clarify my terminology, “Lifestyle” is my shorthand for the era during which the CPSE was built and was dominant, beginning in the late 90s and peaking in the 2010s. A “configuration of the social order” is the cultural, technological, and productive shape of a society at a given historical moment. A configuration consists of 1) a mode of production and subsistence around which society is organized, paired with 2) a basis for group relation and identity formation. I call the CPSE a configuration of the social order because it differs from earlier paradigms of production and social sorting, such as class. In the eyes of the 20th century’s preeminent cultural analysts, Bourdieu and Veblen, social sorting of groups occurs through the vertically stratified distribution of cultural knowledge, manners and taste, and fashionable goods. Historical class was upstream of this distribution, especially in European cultures where class awareness is much stronger than America. The CPSE, on the other hand, does not care about class. Media technologies and industrial model are upstream, and subcultures, especially internet consumer subcultures, are the downstream effects, little pools of meaning that people find themselves in. ↩

spring-summer-2020

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 20:55:00 +0000

Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 16:44:00 +0000

The uneasy Web 2.0 truce between social networks, legacy media, and brands is falling apart. Once it was held together by ad tech. But advertising spends keep going up, brand content is at peak saturation, and audiences are slowly but surely evacuating the big social media companies. Can the three forces — social media, content, and commerce — find a new way relate to each other?

Here enters the question of community.

As high quality content and effective brand strategy move down the long tail, “community” has become an important concept for every post-Web 2.0 player. Crypto token holders, influencer fanbases, DTC brand customers, creator audiences, and new social networks are all often referred to as communities, and each has a stake in developing community for itself.

A new business type here is the paid community: a direct subscription to join in. Today, most paid communities live on the outskirts of existing social platforms. But as they become normalized, paid communities are becoming a viable business model for smaller-scale social networks aiming to be both profitable and socially sustainable.

This emerging new media thing, the paid community social network, has new rules and new risks, and just as it will require new skillsets to operate, requires a new way of understanding what both business and community mean.

The Emergence of Paid Communities

In the last 5 years we’ve seen several interesting innovations as Web 2.0 business models recombined into new mixtures of content, social media, and commerce. Let’s take a look at each of these.

Content and commerce have been merging to create new publishing endeavors that make no distinction between advertising and editorial. These businesses take multiple forms: they include expensive brand-led lifestyle marketing initiatives like the WeTransfer blog and Casper’s Woolly Magazine; “native advertising” efforts like Vox’s Explainer Studio, NYT’s affiliate marketing play with the Wirecutter acquisition; and the extension of lifestyle magazines into product, such as 032c’s streetwear line.

Content and social are also unifying, with Twitch streaming and YouTube being the biggest video players. Meanwhile paid newsletters have taken off in a big way in the last two years. In content + community, an audience connects around a specific content producer through some platform.

Finally, commerce and social are coming together, although to much less a degree than marketing teams who talk up “brand communities” would like you to think. In all but a few cases, “community” here is just the marketing language used to describe a microbrand’s niche Instagram fandom. To me “community” implies users regularly engaging with each other, a criterion which indicates that the “regular crowd” at neighborhood joints or local skate shops are much truer communities than most online brands. Nevertheless, brands are now much better at directly engaging current and future customers through social media. This merger is clearly happening.

Each pairing of verticals has produced some of the most interesting companies and media projects of the last few years. But what’s happening now is that all three are coming together in a new way, fusing to form a completely different type of business: paid communities.

Paid communities are a still-nascent category, but the business model is familiar: free content with a subscription paywall for more (the standard model of content + social). Paid communities develop this formula further: they take the subject matter of a content producer or brand lifestyle, and pair it with a paywalled digital social space for ongoing user interaction. Here the community is not a passive audience, but one that generates its own discussion, and for users comprises much of the value in and of itself. This community often comes to re-shape the brand or content development process.

Here are a few examples of burgeoning paid communities you might have already heard of:

Stratechery: paid content + members-only forum, for investors and tech strategists.
Venkatesh Rao’s Art of Gig / Yak Collective: paid content + a Discord channel, for indie consultants.
New Models: content aggregator + commissioned content + paid Discord channel (conducted through Patreon), for artists and cultural producers.
It’s also worth mentioning that Substack is currently layering on commenting + social features for paid newsletters, so many successful Substacks qualify.

These new paid communities largely live on invite-only Telegrams, Slacks, Discords, and Facebook groups, raising the question: could there be applications more suitable to these networks? Indeed, the growing popularity of paid communities has been noticed by a bunch of new venture-funded companies such as such as Genevachat, Mighty Networks, and Circle, all of which want to become “the platform for communities.”

Ironically, these “community platforms” are themselves largely clones of Slack and Discord. They have been designed to fit what already exists on the market — to generically scale to support every possible group — in order to drive the user numbers that can support venture-scale returns. With heavy competition and no differentiation, how could any one of these new platforms become successful? This paradox reveals the limits of venture capital logic. An alternative market analysis is needed to understand this emerging space.

Patreon is a good example of why generic community platforms are not the future. You could certainly say that Patreon is already at the center of content, social, and commerce. But of course, Patreon has for years been getting unbundled into A, B, and C type businesses. The reason for Patreon’s erosion is that its product design is totally unsuitable for all three use cases: it’s a bad brand platform, a bad content platform, and a bad social platform. Patreon is a classic case of what Venkatesh Rao calls “Too Big to Nail,” and businesses that try to follow in its stead will face similar challenges.

Don’t buy into the VC hype on this one. There will not be one tool to serve new internet-first communities.

Meanwhile, dozens of alternative social networks have sprouted up in the last couple years. With the maturation of Javascript-based web development and plenty of front-end talent, it’s become easy to build complex web applications with tiny teams. futureland.tv, Dialup, Special Fish, and alternative dating app Bighead are among these new experiments. These alternative social networks are interesting in part because they prove that dissatisfaction with mainstream web has motivated significant movement to alternatives. But they are also interesting because of their unique user communities.

New social networks have typically struggled to monetize due to their small audience sizes, as they are unable to achieve the scale to make meaningful revenue from advertising. Paid communities, however, supply an engaged and paying audience, providing an alternative route to sustainability for independent social networks. At the same time, social networks solve some of the deficiencies of paid content and brand communities. This is worth understanding well.

Businesses want to be active participants in their customers’ social landscape, because brand values are the last battleground for differentiation. This is the very justification for community marketing, and the driving force behind the evolution of brand social media accounts from joke memes to increasingly woke and personal human voices. Offering a dedicated social space is a further extension of social participation. By providing a social space, brands can try to deepen their connection with users and have a place for content they produce to be discussed.

Similarly, the topic-specific functionality entertainers build into their streams can be seen as prototypes for rich social spaces. In journalistic media, content providers with growing audiences also need tools to manage their audience and moderate discussion. Slack’s 10,000 message limit for free accounts is a major obstruction to doing knowledge work in these spaces, and Discord’s free tier has lamentably small file upload size limits.

At this point, you may wonder: “why don’t users just want one place to manage all their communities?” Today’s existing tools will continue to be sufficient for some communities, and Discord and Slack’s robust bot APIs are capable of solving some community needs. But fundamentally, they are still based on chat, and chat simply isn’t the right core user experience for many other communities. Unique functionality and bespoke interfaces provide distinct advantages that off-the-shelf tooling can never achieve.

In order to understand how diverse and specialized these paid community / social networks can be, a few case studies, drawing from different scales, will be helpful.

Replit
Replit is a community of young programmers, supported by a forum, a real-time collaborative IDE, and a library of openly forkable code projects. The deep integration between Replit’s social space and its programmer tooling enable efficient knowledge workflows and sharing of user-generated content. At the same time, it facilitates the growth of a highly collaborative culture specific to this set of tools. Replit has gone the venture capital route, monetizes through a premium offering including paid cloud storage and unlimited private projects.

Are.na
Are.na, founded in 2012, can claim to be one of the most successful indie social networks. (Disclosure: I am a shareholder through its Republic crowdfund.) Originally bootstrapped by a small community of NYC-based artists, it has grown to over 12,000 monthly active users, largely designers, artists, researchers, and educators. For these users the restrained interface, absence of an algorithmic feed, and community of intellectuals and cultural producers have made it a popular tool. As of May 2020, Are.na took in a respectable $20,000 monthly recurring revenue for its premium feature set (group features and unlimited private blocks), and posted strong retention numbers. Though some have described Are.na as “nerdy Pinterest,” it is this same niche focus, “white cube” aesthetic, and longstanding community channels such as Freak Hacks and Images With Captions On Wikipedia that make it a choice place for designers and artists to collaborate.

Bloomberg
Bloomberg is one of the world’s largest and most valuable companies. It provides financial data and analytics tools through its ubiquitous Bloomberg Terminal, which costs $35,000 per year to license. What most people don’t know is that the Bloomberg Terminal contains hundreds of microapplications, including Bloomberg-exclusive social tools. Byrne Hobart puts it thusly:

The key point to understand about Bloomberg is that it’s both a software product and a social network. The software product determined who would join the network, but the network is what keeps users there. It’s like a multiplayer video game, or Harvard: Sure, the quests and campus are useful, but people keep showing up because of the friends they’ve made or the connections they intend to make.

Byrne Hobart https://marker.medium.com/why-its-hard-to-kill-the-bloomberg-terminal-61073482e496

Among other social apps, Bloomberg Terminal features a Bloomberg Hacker News clone, a Bloomberg Craigslist clone, Bloomberg instant messaging, and Bloomberg-restricted email. From this perspective it is possible to view Bloomberg as a company that offers a full-stack set of social environments, news, and tooling for a distinct community with specific needs: financial workers. While Bloomberg shows what is possible when the community in question already works with large amounts of capital, its lessons are applicable to niche content providers.

Bloomberg is an example of the classic Web 2.0 business maxim “come for the tool, stay for the network.” But the inverse trajectory, from which this essay takes its name, is now equally viable: “come for the network, pay for the tool.” Just as built-in social networks are a moat for information products, customized tooling is a moat for social networks.¹

This entrenchment effect provides a realistic business case for bespoke social networks. Running a bespoke social network means you’re basically in the same business as Slack, but for a focused community and with tailored features. This is a great business to be in for the same reasons Slack is: low customer acquisition costs and long lifetime value. The more tools, content, and social space are tied together, the more they take on the qualities of being infrastructure for one’s life.

By now you might be starting to think about businesses and communities could benefit from paid social networks. I posed this same question to my colleagues at Other Internet and we devised some interesting answers:

Small media organizations
Aggregators like New Models and popular paid newsletters or podcasts which are increasingly cultivating community discussion may soon arrive at a point where their subscribers themselves generate enough interesting content to become part of the publishing workflow. What mixed media discussion + writing + recording social space would support this?
Custom tooling for streamer communities
Relatedly, streamers on Twitch could benefit from a tighter integration of broadcasting tools, chat, and rewards, currently handled through awkward OBS ↔ Twitch ↔ Plugin workflows.
Small-scale political community organizing / mutual aid
Instead of a chat feed, perhaps here would be periodic goals and interventions that people work towards — like a action-focused Nextdoors for specific areas or missions.
Chat groups for gaming and fantasy sports
A community space designed for Dungeons & Dragons players that includes character creation interfaces, dice tools, and ways of carrying out campaigns is going to be dramatically richer and stickier than a Discord. For fantasy sports crews, one can imagine a number of betting, picking, revealing, and game mode interfaces, particular to the idiosyncrasies of different communities.
Hobbyist communities currently served by traditional retailers
Brand networks that assemble niche social communities around an activity that the brand uniquely facilitates, e.g. the Bass Pro Shops community where you chat but also have a convenient interface for building out and displaying your jigging setup. I’m surprised this doesn’t exist for gun enthusiasts yet.
Education and practitioner networks
We’re seeing a lot of new venture funded education communities, but here once more is a reason to be more excited about bottom-up community-driven businesses. What happens when groups of independent teachers or consultants who are already chatting have shared interfaces to formalize, quote, and invoice? In the past, guilds have provided excellent education opportunities, and they can again.
Food influencer communities
In which you only get access to the recipes and discussion if you subscribe. It’s kind of surprising this one doesn’t exist yet, considering what a poor substitute Instagram is.
Entertainment and fandoms
The evolution of fan forums probably looks more like bespoke interfaces designed by the companies which actually create the characters. JK Rowling’s “Pottermore” is an early example of what this looks like; later communities will likely be more video-focused, and will borrow from the ARG toolkit to involve users in ongoing plotlines or reality TV style dynamics.
Programmer communities
Replit leans young and isn’t tailored to any specific language; there will be more communities and tooling suited to particular types of language, and perhaps around specific open source projects.
Communities that govern things
The crypto community has spawned several interesting use cases for bespoke, paid social networks. Some crypto protocols, like Compound and Maker, allow token holders vote on changes to a token economy. Other crypto communities, like Moloch and its siblings, have users buy in with their own funds and then vote how they should be collectively allocated. These tools are still rudimentary, but here we see a tight integration of tooling and discussion that is applicable in other governance contexts (e.g. municipal governance participation, voting on actions an influencer takes, etc.).

(Thanks especially to Bryan Lehrer for his contributions to this list.)

Community, Coordination, Conclusion

So far I’ve put forward an argument that paid social networks are a feasible and practical business. But as indicated above, there will be many different types of paid social network, and some will be more sustainable than others. In the coming years I expect this business model to feature prominently in debates about business practices. Most business writing lacks a meaningful engagement with the question of whether the strategies, tactics, and trends on offer are good, in a larger and longer term sense. It is negligent not to address these questions. In this final section I will speak to the issues raised by this merger of content, social, and commerce, and how they can be thought about.

What does “community” mean? Facebook calls its billions of users a community, and multinational brands use this word to refer to their customers. Are these communities in any meaningful sense? What about the “brand communities” I mentioned earlier, do these qualify? And can a community that is paid truly be called a community at all? As paid communities become more prominent, I expect to see these questions asked more frequently and urgently. Marketers, venture capitalists, and business writers will answer from one perspective, offering up ways to monetize large swaths of people. Journalists and critics will reply with a different perspective, decrying organizations for extracting value from relationships. And I imagine we will hear the voice of communities themselves, defending just who they are from both sides.

Different users of the “community” word have different motivations, and these motivations will be the origin of conflict — conflict not only about the word’s meaning, but about how this type of business should be operated. But these debates, no matter how uncomfortable, should be had. Because in a very real way, the financial and social sustainability of paid communities will depend on the degree to which the communities are recognized not as a monetizable resource but as a body of people with social needs, emotional lives, and practical concerns of livelihood.

Companies, influencers, and content creators frequently clash with their customers and audiences. Both companies and audiences make demands and take actions the other party deems unacceptable. Paid communities and social networks are unlikely to be an exception. But they also present opportunities for improving alignment and making this relationship less adversarial.

Success here will come down to implementation details. The incentive structure, funding sources, size, goals, moderation approach, and community management philosophy of these networks will determine their long term viability as both businesses and communities. Whether coming at it from the angle of social media, brand, or content creator, building and managing a community is its own skillset. Organizations which try to bolt on community or social networks to their existing business model without building the capacity to understand and engage the people who make it up are likely to fail.

One of Web 2.0’s most crucial lessons is that extractive business models cannot be masked by marketing for very long. This is doubly true when the community itself is part of what people are paying for. Users will quickly turn on network operators if they sense hypocrisy or are given no voice in the development of the service. I am least optimistic about the prospects of paid social networks run by large corporations, brands, and IP holders. For instance, if a major entertainment company operates a fandom social network, the content and features it develops are likely to support the revenue goals of the company over the community’s social well-being.² Earlier in this piece, I voiced a similar skepticism of so-called “brand communities,” in which the members are often quite transparently viewed as free marketing resources. I expect many projects along these lines to end with multiple rounds of community frustration, exit, and further monetization.

The inevitable failures, however, should not discredit the entire project of bespoke social networks designed around specific community needs. Prospective entrepreneurs, operators, content creators, and designers are the “social engineers” of these spaces, and here is found the transformative potential of the model. Here, design, development, and content creation are no longer merely tools for generating revenue; they are also tools of community organizing. Here, design and engineering take on the valence of care, and the emotional involvement of being a contributor, moderator, and member. Where does “design” end and “moderation” begin? Because the mainstream social networks have been designed by a tiny number of people, we have been prevented from experimenting and creating new knowledge about what sustainable community management online looks like. Start erasing the line between operators, customers, and community members and squint; you begin make out the shape of a group of people who can build for themselves and determine their own path of development.

These days I find myself away from broadcast tools and more in the insular channels of my friend groups. What I want from technology is to share life with my friends; to be given the opportunity, and the power, to share that life, and all it includes… showing them care, or sharing the bits of knowledge that seem important to us as a group.

To reinforce the fulfilment of collective potential in whatever direction our groups take off in. Some of my friends watch stuff together; some of my friends remark on goings-on; some of my friends research together; all communicate entirely differently. Not all of them belong on "IRC, but for gamers," or "IRC, but for highly productive and extremely important teams." And yet, that's where we are.

Matilde Park https://urbit.org/blog/tools-of-our-own/

I take my own definition of the word “community” from educational theorists Etienne and Beverly Wenger: “communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” I like this definition because it is so broad while capturing a really specific truth about groups. It applies as much to my funny little squad of researchers and designers as it does to “weird twitter” and to group psychology participants and to token economy managers, and to families. As disparate as these things are, they share one thing: even when we don’t know who “us” is yet, we’re all learning how to become who we are. Identity is always about groups, and group formation is always about identity formation, and both are processes of learning.

As more and more identity formation happens online, it is inevitable that most of it happens in private spaces. As we spend more and more time living in these spaces, it’s inevitable that their intentional shaping should become more important to us. As more and more internet-first communities choose to build the means for themselves to live, it is inevitable that both “community” and “business” will take on new meanings. We are transitioning from an era of centralized management of human development and financial capital into an era where both identity formation and resource allocation happens in decentralized, loosely-coordinated, and emergent ways. I think we will gain the most learnings about the future of business and identity not from top-down corporate models of community management, but from friends, squads, and content creators starting groups and supporting the legitimate participation of community members in their ongoing development, finance, and governance.

Thanks to the Blogger Peer Review for ideation, editing, and review, namely John Palmer, Bryan Lehrer, Kara Kittel, Matilde Park, Edouard Urcades, Arthur Roing Baer, David Cole, Laurel Schwulst, and Tom Critchlow.

Responses

Aaron Z. Lewis has written a public response to this essay over on his own blog. Click through to read the full thing!

The digital community organizing that you describe in your post seems like a more sober-minded rendition of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (which John Perry Barlow apparently wrote while he was drunk). The internet is clearly shifting the balance of power, but it hasn’t led to the moneyless disembodied utopia he envisioned. Barlow said, “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here … Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.” This idealistic dream brings to mind Marc Andreessen’s recent confession that the “original sin” of the internet was not building a payments layer into the browser. The paid communities you investigate seem like an attempt to remedy that sin and ground cyberspace in the material/economic systems that support our livelihoods.

I want to share some loosely connected reflections about online communities and how they might interact with legacy governance structures in the future. Topics on the docket: distributed universities, hype houses, Kanye’s charter city, the political “grain” of online platforms, Silicon Valley’s desire to “disrupt” the nation-state, and digital localism.

Aaron Z. Lewis https://aaronzlewis.com/blog/2020/07/19/re-come-for-the-network/

Twitter acquaintance Romain from French brand strategy agency hellofdp wrote a public response on his newsletter.

I think the notion of “bottom-up community-driven businesses” is really important here. The paid community concept is a reconfiguration of digital communities caused by the failure of big social networks to ensure deep vertical communities to thrive. It provides mainstream tools to niche communities. Maybe niche communities need niche products? One hypothesis could be that “bottom-up community-driven businesses” emerge when one community is mature enough to have all it takes to self-organise itself and separate from big platforms. Then the question of sustainability and incentives mentioned in the last part seem of the highest importance. A different kind of chicken and egg problem than what big platforms face.
Hellofdp https://hellofdp.substack.com/archive

Endnotes

Eugene Wei comes to a similar conclusion in his Status as a Service. ↩
Thanks to Kara Kittel for this important point. ↩

re: garden of forking memes

Sat, 11 Jul 2020 04:31:00 +0000

Aaron, I’ve been reflecting on your Garden of Forking Memes essay. I’m so glad you’ve written such a comprehensive piece on this topic of subculture and history, and I’m honored you asked me to provide feedback on it. It gave me a lot of thoughts that I wanted to flesh out, so I’m responding here. I’m most interested to talk with you about something we’ve discussed a bit before, something which is left implicit in your essay: the disappearance and now reappearance of the future as an idea, and the question of from where the actual future will come.

The conversations of internet subcultures often feel substantive and expansive compared to the shallow discourse of presidential debates, op-ed pages, and cable TV shows. Mainstream news cycles rarely last more than a few hours, and their narratives are constantly shifting. They don’t tend to give a big-picture sense of where we came from or where we’re going. Internet subcultures, by contrast, are building grand narratives and meme worlds that help people feel their way through the chaos that’s currently unfolding. These stories cut deep, down to the most foundational questions of race and religion and destiny. We shouldn’t be too surprised that complex conspiracy theories, intergenerational trauma, and age-old religious fervor are coming to the fore — in a contest of narrative memes, deep history is a serious competitive advantage.
Aaron Z. Lewis https://aaronzlewis.com/blog/2020/07/07/the-garden-of-forking-memes

This part of your essay recalled me to our last in-person conversation. In January, you and I were sitting in A/D/O, talking about all manner of things, when you pointed out that every trace of the future seems to have been vanished from popular media. Perhaps this observation was inspired by this sterile piece of public art, whose ceaseless revolutions into new, forgettable arrangements of panels we watched as we conversed.

Your observation certainly held true for prestige television: the most popular shows of the last decade have been either gritty realist tragedies (e.g. The Wire, Breaking Bad, even the family politics of Game of Thrones) and unimaginative alternative-now dystopias (e.g. Black Mirror, Handmaid’s Tale, Man in the High Castle). The same could be said for movies, with the addition of campy fantasy, and here I’m sure I showed you this classic David Rudnick tweet. And of course, it’s been said by many that contemporary critical theory seems to have abandoned a progressive agenda beyond enumerating endless variations of capitalism — the carceral, communicative, surveillance…. Even fiction appears to have lost its edge, with last year’s most lauded sci-fi-adjacent novels, Oval and Infinite Detail, failing to render a meaningful vision of the future in any way.

A training program to acclimatize the citizen under late capitalism to learn and love humanity's new role as spectator and occasional collateral damage in a society consisting of godlike megacorporations and their chaotic interactions? That would be The Marvel Cinematic Universe
— ཊལབསརངཧ (@David_Rudnick) April 27, 2019

On the other hand, when optimistic ideas for the future do get proposed (such as carless cities or 100% renewable energy) they are often deemed either unrealistic, delusional, or fiction by mainstream media. I recall coming to the hilarious and grim conclusion that the only type of pop media where a vision of the future is taken seriously is the “request for startup” variety of venture capitalist blog posts. Unfortunately this half-joke was borne out later this year with Marc Andreessen’s TIME TO BUILD essay managing to inspire and invigorate thousands, despite containing no plan for what specifically we should be building towards.

Returning to your essay, it seems that history actually has ended in some meaningful way within mainstream consciousness. While the entire media environment today operates under stream logic — involving the continuous production of new pseudo-events — what is different about legacy 20th-century media institutions is that their discursive progression is wholly ignorant of the past. The evolving discourse of new internet native subcultures, on the other hand, continues to produce history by incorporating new historical facts into themselves. I hope readers take your line “deep history is a serious competitive advantage” literally. Internet-native groups seek out historical events not only because they are politically aware, but because they are in competition with other ideological streams. To combine with Louise Druhle’s analogy, they are under selective pressure to increase their gravitational pull, and in doing so are producing significantly more compelling narratives than mainstream media.

One thing I’m unclear on is why history disappeared from mainstream consciousness in the way it did. Mark Fisher would say that neoliberal subjectivity corrodes one’s imaginary capabilities — the “slow cancellation of the future.” Philip Mirowski would be more explicit, arguing that neoliberal doctrine has had such patently devastating consquences for the working person that it has needed to obscure the origin of its crises and actively shape public discourse to protect itself. I’d also speculate about the separation of public and private spheres we currently tend to make, and the separation of home life, public life, and civic life, both of which also go back to the 70s, but I know little about those things. I guess a good generalization inclusive of all of the above would be that culture is in many ways downstream of capital.

On the other hand, mainstream media may have become ignorant of history as a psychological defense. The development of multihistories and memetic competition is just another way of saying the culture war. While we’ve all gotten used to living in a persistent conflict zone, it’s not exactly fun. Under these conditions, the mainstream world of lukewarm takes and forever-breaking news cycles, this Disneyfied universe of crossover events, characterized by the ambient listlessness of memory lapse, provides a sort of dull respite for the mind strained by ideological battle. Do you think this purgatory can last? What is its relationship with centrism? Personally, I’d guess any relief mainstream consciousness provides is illusory. The mainstream is under attack from all sides, with groups of all types attempting to seize its ideological ground. The best defense against ideology remains ideology.

Then there are nomadic anthropologists like you and I. So far, we haven’t declared a side. Up until now I’ve preferred to play the merchant, traveling from tribe to tribe, here selling a rare gem, there performing a clever trick learned far away, collecting oddities and fragments of wisdom as I make my living on the spice route.

The futures we envision never appear, receding into memory like dreams... The real future merges fluidly into the present, forcing revisions, mergers, and forks of historical streams of consciousness....
— Toby (@tobyshorin) June 17, 2020

You ask:

How does the immediate accessibility of so many alt histories undermine our ability to create shared futures?
Aaron Z. Lewis https://aaronzlewis.com/blog/2020/07/07/the-garden-of-forking-memes

But if all we’ve said before is true, doesn’t it follow that the actual future of humanity will develop not out of mainstream consciousness but out of one or more of these subcultures with a view of big history. In his New Models interview, Venkat mentioned something along these lines: that while inventing the future once took the ambition and charisma of an Elon Musk or an Edison, it’s now realistic to be able to invent the future for a few thousand citizens of one’s small-scale subjective reality.

That’s one reason why at some point, I think it’s more virtuous to choose the future we want to live in than to arbitrage from culture to another. Personally, I’ve never been able to avoid writing moralizing conclusions to my own essays, and these days I’m inclined to push myself further in that direction. I think that’s my biggest difference from Venkat, and the source of my biggest disagreement with him. What’s the point of developing Correct Opinions if you don’t use them to actualize the future you believe in? That’s one reason I’ve been addressing my writing slightly more toward a business audience. We are living in a liminal time, a time with high tolerance (outside the mainstream) for new ideas and experiments with new ways of living. We have higher leverage than we think.

One area I’m investing time into thinking about is new ownership models and ways of dealing with capital. I don’t understand monetary policy and I’m not particularly knowledgeable about economics, but it’s clear to me that we need new ways of understanding and allocating value the networked 21st century. I believe many of the co-ownership experiments happening in cryptocurrency communities can be made less esoteric and ported to areas outside. Capital ownership is a counterbalance to wage stagnation. Economists say that wealth has universal power laws, but designable economic models can surely make the curve more equitable. That’s a future worth working towards, IMO.

To what groups and ideas have you been hitching your camel? What history do you believe everyone should acknowledge? And what future? Your essay left me with questions about the role of the individual. Identity has never been ahistorical, and history has never been apolitical, but now more than ever, our identity is a decision of historical politics. With a self awareness unmatched by any historical subject, we see who we walk alongside, and can choose our caravan. We may not all be history-makers, we are all at least history selectors.

Towards a Blogger Peer Review

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 04:12:00 +0000

The text renaissance we’re experiencing today isn’t just about new writing and publishing tools. It’s also about new ways of working, collaborating, and authoring.

For instance, I created a simple component on my website that lets me attribute authorship of parts of text to another writer. This allowed me to collaborate with Kara, Drew, Edouard on our recent piece Premonition while maintaining our distinct voices. Using quotebacks to cite someone generously with context and linkbacks enables me to have a rich conversation another writer. Of course, one of the most interesting quotation-slash-collaborative-authoring phenomena is Twitter threading. “Tweetstorms” were around for a few years, but the move to 280 characters and the quote tweet feature really opened up the door for a new type of public knowledge work.

That brings me to the idea of blogger peer review. This phrase has been tumbling around in my mind for a while. In the university and research worlds, “peer review” is an editing, revision, and publishing workflow that must be strictly followed in order to publish in academic journals. But in the context of web publishing, or blogging, the idea of peer review could mean many different things. A rigorously reviewed journal intiative? A set of commenting and publishing practices? A way of revealing previous drafts of pieces? At Other Internet, we host our own blogger peer review group in Keybase, where we regularly workshop ideas and edit each others’ writing and research. I also have an ongoing weekly writing session with Headless Brands co-authors Laura Lotti and Sam Hart, which has become one of my most rewarding and generative intellectual collaborations. This too feels like one possible expression of blogger peer review.

I’m sure there are a bunch of similar groups out there with their own models of peer review, collaboration, and citation practices. I love how h0p3 of philosopher.life participates with his entire family in collaborative blogging. But the idea of blogger peer review, and new citation practices on the web, leads to an important and interesting question: just who gets to contribute to human knowledge?

Who gets to contribute to knowledge?

All over the web, people are thinking deeply and contributing to the great pool of human knowledge. As well as diarists and poets, there are also many blogs (viz. “web logs”) which contribute a type of knowledge upon which others rely and act. Jerry Brito blogs about cryptocurrency legal issues; danah boyd blogs about online social phenomena. Slate Star Codex blogs about god knows what, but people change their life because of him.

How does such information get legitimized, however? That is: how does it get discriminated from crank ideas and conspiracy theory? To date, we’ve mostly acted as if popular writing on the web “speaks for itself” — that its popularity alone validates its authority, with virality as a sort of proxy for “having been read and deemed worthy by the appropriate people.” This type of thinking is a legacy of interacting with institutional media like scientific journals and mainstream media.

Within mainstream media and university contexts, web writing is often treated as tenuous, unscientific, and un-authorized. In these places, even highest quality and most influential internet-originated writing is frequently relegated to the status of “cult popularity.” Only rarely do online-first takes on economics, management theory, cultural theory, and analytic philosophy, among others, make the leap into academia, that other internet of texts.¹ There are perhaps numerous reasons why this is the case. A significant one, though, is the lack of coherent citation and attribution practices on the web.

While the up-front literature review portion of academic texts can be dull to read, this standardized format allows academics to quickly understand each others’ references, and how those references are being interpreted. On the web, viral ideas and terminology are frequently, both accidentally and strategically, taken out of context and misinterpreted. This is true of terms like “context collapse,” which is frequently used to refer to the missing bodily affordances of online conversation, but which was coined to discuss the cramming of multiple conversational contexts into one interface.

Like many social network sites, Twitter flattens multiple audiences into one – a phenomenon known as ‘context collapse’. The requirement to present a verifiable, singular identity makes it impossible to differ self-presentation strategies, creating tension as diverse groups of people flock to social network sites.

Alice E. Marwick, Danah Boyd https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/I-tweet-honestly%2C-I-tweet-passionately%3A-Twitter-and-Marwick-Boyd/0ee2da37957b9d5b3fcc7827c84ee326cd8cb0c3

Similarly, Venkat’s “premium mediocre” idea certainly has become legitimized through its viral popularity, but nearly all references deploy only its weakest and most basic sense — an aesthetic — rather than the most crucial point of the concept:

As practiced by its core class of Bernie voters, premium mediocrity is ultimately a rational adaptive response to the challenge of scoring a middle-class life lottery ticket in the new economy. It is an economic and cultural rearguard action by young people launched into life from the old middle class, but not quite equipped to stay there, and trying to engineer a face-saving soft landing…somewhere.

Not all who participate in the culture of premium mediocrity share in the precarity that defines its core, trend-setting, thingness-defining sub-class, but precarity is the source of the grammar and visual aesthetic — and it is primarily visual — of premium mediocrity.

@ribbonfarmhttps://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-of-maya-millennial/

There will always be multiple ways of interpreting a text, but what happens on the web is less interpretary differences than sheer indeterminacy. The opposite of context collapse is context attrition, the rapid fragmentation of a situated knowledge artifact into a wider set of contexts, exploding opportunities for a process of review, debate, and consensus production. New ideas online thus often reduced to memes, a lowest-common-denominator version favoring transmission over nuance. As an evolutionary ecosystem in process, social media “selects” for knowledge packaged into this format. This is true, but not necesarily desirable, nor the only viable outcome.

Memes are one bit of evidence for this trend. Memes don’t just go to the log-level themselves, they witness the game of abstractions itself from the underbelly perspective, bracketing and framing them with sensory-phenomenological templates.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) June 7, 2020

In fact, there are exceptions that prove this rule about how knowledge gets legitimated online. We can learn from the areas on the internet that successfully resist context attrition and have managed to produce internally consistent knowledge and practices. These communities are often insular and impenetrable to outsiders. I’m again thinking here of LessWrong and the rationalist community, with its sequences, and in fact a custom set of interfaces that provide strong affordances for internal citation, quoting, response, and conversational debate. Another example might be conspiracy communities (this is not an intentional jab at the rationalist community here). Conspiracy communities cultivate their own specialized knowledge, often leaning on their own specialized citation graph, and strongly resist the influence of conflicting outsider knowledge. While conspiratorial knowledge rarely penetrates mainstream consciousness, the flat earther and breakaway civilization communities have, like the rationalist community, successfully produced their own rough consensuses and have a process for legitimating knowledge.

To return to academia, it should be clear that this is similar to how academic knowledge production happens. Labs, deparments, journals, and publications are the forums for disucssion, debate, citation and legitimation. People in the same field learn to share the same set of references, and even cross-disciplinary commentators learn learn to work within these contexts if they want to be accepted. Naturally there are undesirable consequences to this as well, such as citation cartels and, of course, the related reproducibility crisis. Could academic work benefit from exposure to the free-for-all of the open web? That “marketplace of ideas?” An interesting case study here is Alexey Guzey’s investigation of Matthew Walker’s book “Why We Sleep.” Guzey examined Walker’s claims and examined each citation in Chapter 1, finding numerous “misinterpretations” and even fabrications. UC Berkeley’s response to these allegations have been dismissal, effectively denying Guzey’s contributions as valid scientific literature.

I’ve given these few case studies to provide a very rough sketch of different knowledge legitimation practices and what is at stake in them. Knowledge production in the academy—in both STEM fields and social sciences—and knowledge production online are very different environments and sets of practices. Each distinct realm will continue to exist. Yet “blogging” and “academic writing” can each learn from one another and profit from further cross-pollination.² I believe that new citation, editing, and authorship practices can open new paths to legitimacy, validation, and importantly, refutation, for efforts originating from both sides.

Concretely, what does the desirable outcome of such cross-pollination look like? It would be anachronistic for internet-first writers to begin writing for academic journals. It’s still important to understand that the web is a new medium—in fact several new media—irrupting and colonizing earlier forms of information transmission from without and within. Today’s academic knowledge production, based on the production and dissemination of print texts, will not survive into the next century. At the same time, we clearly need more rigorous standards and practices for online writing to achieve the same level of validation and legitimacy. I’m interested in the Underlay project at MIT’s Knowledge Futures Group, which attempts to digitally represent knowledge in different fields as competing sets of assertions. Such an approach would allow us to understand the diversity of ways of understanding and orienting to different sets of information, an integrative, reconstructive, post-post-modern approach.

Toward this end, better web-native quoting, threading, and interrelated knowledge graphs—along with all their attendant new practices and behaviors—can enable a more stable set of interpretations for web writing. To me, this means that there are more opportunities for today’s blogs to become first-class citizens of the great process of human knowledge production. That’s blogger peer review.

(This has happened to me exactly once: my pieces on authenticity were cited in an anthropology paper. While I know I made a novel contribution to the topic, I’m sure this only happened because I was quite diligent about properly citing existing academic texts treating the subject.) ↩
A further case study here is the fraught relationship between Lesswrong and its spiritual leader, Elizier Yudkowsky, and professional philosophy. Graham Johnson of Suspended Reason has documented this. ↩

Introducing Quotebacks

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 04:12:00 +0000

Tom Critchlow and I have written a web-native quoting tool called Quotebacks, which is now available for download. Quotebacks allow you grab any piece of text from the web, and quote-tweet it in your blog without losing context, like this:

Interestingness is not a fixed property, but a move in a conversation between what everyone in the audience already knows (the “assumption ground“) and the surprise reveal. Being interesting means that the audience shares, or can be made to share, the common knowledge that the author seeks to undermine. Interestingness is a function of whatever body of knowledge is already assumed to be true. Therefore, it can be difficult to see the interestingness – the point – of a fragment of an alien conversation.
@ribbonfarmhttps://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/06/01/why-books-are-fake/

Thus, “Quotebacks” is three things:

A web-native citation standard and matching UX pattern
A tiny library, quoteback.js, that converts HTML <blockquote> tags into elegant interactive webcomponents
A browser extension to create quoteback embeds and store any quotes you save to publish later

If you’re interested, you can download the extension and try it out yourself, and learn about the project details at quotebacks.net.

Thank you to our early testers Sonya, CJ, and the Blogger Peer Review.

Premonition

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 04:12:00 +0000

For three weeks, I have wondered: how much of what I’ve thought and written about on this site is even relevant now?

Everyone who thinks about culture must ask themselves this on a regular basis. But these circumstances call for a more serious reevaluation. The pandemic has fractured the discourse, exposing how many layers of assumptions formed the bedrock. Access to goods. Mobility. A functioning global economy. Health. Friends and collaborators are wondering the same thing. Surrounded by a cacophony of blame and helplessness and cope, it’s hard to hear yourself think.

Finally, last Friday’s unusually warm evening, spent on the roof of my NYC quarantine zone, gave way to clarity. The right questions came: which of my beliefs remain unchanged? What assumptions will remain in place? What trends will be accelerated, which delayed, and which stopped entirely? What do I care about that has become newly relevant, and what no longer matters?

I circulated these questions to a few friends. What follows here is little more than a cleaned up version of our notes. To be sure, these premonitions are based on a certain depth of cultural observation and processing. But premonitions nonetheless. On the other side of this is the unknown. But if you’re already tracking the intangible, you can hit targets others can’t see.

Culture

For the last few decades we’ve watched the fragmentation proliferation of lifestyles. This parallel evolution seemed to reach a high-water mark in the 2010s for two reasons: A) supply chain efficiencies enabled low-cost production of lifestyle goods, and B) participation in these lifestyles and microcultures also moved online. Both made lifestyles hyper visible.

Under quarantine conditions, there is less opportunity to physically signal one’s participation in a culture, so clothing and conspicuous consumption matter less. Instead, public lifestyle display and subcultural posturing will happen primarily online.

→ After the current display of consumption-as-resilience subsides, we’ll see less emphasis on artifacts — goods, clothes, and consumables.
→ Activities and practices, narratives, and knowledge, which are equally vital components of culture, will instead take precedence. Memes, discourses, aesthetics, language, specialized knowledge and activities, all taking place online, will be the vehicles of lifestyle performance and participation. We’re already seeing plenty of new reading groups, curation modes, and remote hangout formats. Knowledge tooling will be extremely important to this new set of online cultural formation.

A driver here is burnout from the mainstream social web. People previously had IRL hangouts in small numbers to provide intimacy. Now that these spaces are inaccessible, social interaction is moving online. There’s only so much of mainstream social networks, especially those with mass visibility logic (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok), that people can handle.

→ There will need to be new types of interface and digital social environment to support the continued proliferation of lifestyles. We’ll probably see a flourishing of new, social micro-networks. They will not be for everyone. They will be private in nature, and will support between 20 and 1000 people.
→ We’ll see a dramatic acceleration of the exodus from clearnet that began a few years ago.
→ These new social interfaces and environments will breed new types of community and subculture, weirder than before.

Brands

Slickly branded goods and services would likely have taken over our culture and mindshare in the 2010s under most circumstances. However, the infamous venture-funded millennial-branded direct-to-consumer category is recognizable as the result of US monetary policy. Quantitative easing and low interest rates made cheap borrowing possible, and the resultant expansion of venture capital led to many traditional consumer product businesses being funded. Thus, although aesthetic of authenticity and “premium mediocrity” emerged as a result of the financial crisis, they were sustained by money printing.

→ Now that a few high profile DTC brands have been punctured on the public market and the economy is crashing, VC-driven DTC business model will likely go into its own recession. Without DTC, there is an opportunity for a variety of smaller, more sustainably funded players who do not seek hypergrowth.

It’s worth remembering that DTC is not just a type of brand but a business model that utilizes effectively infinite venture funding to flood the market with ads and capture market share. If this is no longer possible…

→ Building brands around shared ownership with customers will probably be increasingly important. Expect to see more crowdfunding, patronage, community, and membership-based go-to-market strategies which make ownership an explicit part of the brand experience. Several crypto-adjacent teams are exploring this territory already.

Creators can use tokens to capture their idea in something that people can hold.

It means that people can own a piece of the future that they want to happen, which makes it more likely that it will happen. And when it does happen, it's theirs.

Creators ⟷ ◯ ⟷ Community pic.twitter.com/ab1JpCwTIw
— 🌜🌞🌛 (@ourZORA) March 27, 2020

Microbrands will be devastated by the recession. We’ll probably see dropshipping companies and other low-margin businesses (skate-shop sized companies) wiped off the map due to financial difficulties and supply chain interruptions. One question I have here is what kinds of supply chain will not be upset? Southeast Asia seems to be less affected by the virus.

On the other hand, it will still be as easy as ever to create a visual identity and set up the technology needed to run a brand. What kind of brands work online — or are online-first?

→ Media and content brands with membership models will likely do very well, as will games, both indie and platforms like Roblox. We’ll see more brands which do not hold any assets whatsoever, but are simply groupings of individuals giving themselves a name and a presence.

Space

Haruka Sakaguchi for New York Times

At some point we will see a return to public space, but with a whole bunch of urban retail and restaurant closures. While some restaurants will re-open, we will not see a significant return of retail to cities. With the economy in recession, people will not have the money or inclination to spend on goods. At the same time, some communities that formed online during this period will want to find each other and continue in meatspace.

→ Wide availability of cheap ground-floor space will create new opportunities for urban revitalization. Cities will need to put incentives in place for small businesses to take over these spaces, and stem the blight of banks and pharmacies that have eaten ground floor retail, have genericized walkable cities in the last decade.

People who left the city due to safety concerns or simply for affordability reasons may not return. Combined with the increasing viability of remote work and zero-hour contracting, we may see further evacuation of the city and a new wave of suburbanization.

→ Bringing with them metropolitan-grade expectations and technology knowhow, the implants of “Suburbia 2.0” will seed the beginning of a new Americana culture, as well as suburban development and investment. This is a long-term prediction.

Drew Austin

@kneelingbus kneelingbus.net

The pandemic will have a lasting impact on the broad appeal of urban life, regardless of its ultimate severity. As restrictions on public activity gradually relax, many people will eagerly return to public space, but there will be significant variation in individuals' comfort with crowded urban spaces or continuing to live in cities at all, as some will prefer to maintain a degree of social distance that is better achieved in the suburbs. Employment will likely suburbanize correspondingly via remote work.

→ Dense cities like New York, which will probably experience the worst pandemic outcomes, might reclaim their 20th-century reputations as unclean or unsafe places. Demand for sanitary enclaves within cities will increase dramatically, complemented by pervasive surveillance. If perceived pandemic risk becomes another cost associated with urban life as more jobs can be done from anywhere, these forces will provide a new logic for sorting people between cities and suburbs, with the latter becoming the default location for individuals without a strong preference for the former.

The quarantine period will have demonstrated the viability of selectively retreating from public space as needed, a process supported by products ranging from Zoom to Amazon Prime to Netflix as well as additional infrastructure that emerges during the quarantine itself. This will reinforce an already-developing attitude that traditional urban life is effectively optional for those who continue to reside in cities and have the means to periodically disengage.

→ Culturally, meatspace will remain downstream from the internet, but digital culture will seek new outlets in the physical world. Meanwhile, more affluent urban populations will have largely retreated from that same public space, a transition facilitated by gig labor and privatized enclaves. The increased availability of urban space relative to demand that results from this will create new opportunities for communities and cultural production to manifest themselves in the physical world.

The fate of the urban environment itself, along with the restaurants and retail that it comprises, will depend upon government interventions at every scale. Without sufficient aid to individuals and small businesses (and even with that aid, to a lesser degree), widespread closures will create a void in commercial real estate demand. Urban brick-and-mortar retail will contract overall due to recession and the continued growth of e-commerce.

→ In a worst-case scenario, retail vacancies will be filled by more corporate chain retailers and even companies like Amazon, who have the cash to buy these distressed assets at a discount or assume their leases. More optimistically, and depending on local interventions, this real estate will become available to a new wave of small-scale entrepreneurs (and even informal uses like squatting in the near term). In the first scenario, the public realm becomes more bland, generic, and lifeless than ever, reinforcing demand for delivery and e-commerce; in the second, that same realm is reinvigorated and returned to its true stakeholders, the people who live there.

Entertainment

In this particular stay-at-home crisis, people will need entertainment more than ever but will have less spending power.

→ Expect an increase in pirating, link sharing, stream sharing, ripping, and other ways of consuming content.
→ Expect a flourishing of new online streaming formats, streaming/meeting hybrids, and participatory gaming variants. I’d also expect socially viral “games,” ranging from e.g. more advanced text chains to full-on ARGs, to take off again in a massive way, especially driven by social networks like Discord and TikTok, the emergent social dynamics of which are less played out.

What other new entertainment models might we see?

→ Expect an increase in online sexwork (pornhub community, onlyfans), and sexwork-adjacent activity (NSFW illustration, e-girling, feet pics, findom).
→ Continuing the theme of new products to serve emergent needs, we may see more advanced infrastructure for sexwork-adjacent activity get built, which formalizes some of these activities with new tools or platforms. Tinder for feet with built-in payments? I’m not joking.

All of this points to new, formalized models for creative labor. Many of these are already nascent, and will become more concrete as creators who can no longer be supported by the brand economy must find new work. We’ll also see the continued unbundling of Patreon into segment-specific interfaces with specialized features.

Tools & Platforms

This situation is forcing us to understand how to retrofit and combine existing technology in new ways to accommodate different social and professional needs. For instance, using Figma has occasionally been used as a place to hang out in and draw, but we’re now seeing furthermore inventive uses.

Playing MTG in @figma with my brother lol pic.twitter.com/rKru5aSbvE
— Ryan (@Flomerboy) March 21, 2020

i guess i’m graduating on FUCKING ROBLOX pic.twitter.com/1r43UwL9nW
— bakugan 🇺🇸⚓️ (@yungthuggamari) March 25, 2020

Both new opportunities and insufficiencies are being revealed in mass communication tooling—Zoom, Notion, Figma.

→ We will probably see Zoom competitors emerge in the next 2 months that serve the JTBD of online collaboration and online socializing much better than Zoom does. I think there are lots of low-hanging fruit in this product space that I’d like to see more of.

Kara Kittel

@karakittel

People will struggle to structure their time now that virtual activities carry more social weight than they did in the past. IRL hangouts have more tangible controls and barriers to entry that prevent people from engaging endlessly, and physical anchors that help form habits and routines. Without that, people are going to either burn out or quickly find ways to partition their digital experiences.

→ New tools and platforms will emerge to spatialize content. More virtual environments and UIs for managing different types of screen usage. Increase in organizational apps and calendar plug-ins that manage time-blocking and screen breaks.

New consumption patterns will emerge on mobile devices vs TV vs computers. Now that these devices are all for at-home use, the ways that “second screens” are used will shift for consumers and advertisers. Film, TV, and ads will place more emphasis on live participation through chats and polls, experimenting with new types of viewer input, and building online fan communities with narratives that cross between social platforms and streaming content.

→ Slow TV will make a resurgence on livestreams– long-form coverage of ordinary events shown in real time. Nature cams, city walks, driving, CCTV feeds, etc. We’ll also see a lot more live variety shows featuring remote participation, collaboration, and competition. - Planned and unplanned interruptions (unexpected events) on long-form live feeds will become a meme / narrative format.
- Curation and real-time editing and presentation of multiple live feeds to tell a story will become more common.
- Livestream channels that invite participation and show multiple live feeds from individual performers or participants.

More self-organizing friend groups and professional networks are using video calls and enterprise chat as a way to socialize. As a result, many individuals will suddenly begin to experience their interactions as content that can be public and monetized, and will feel more pressure to externalize their communications for an audience. → There will be a rapid increase in podcast-style, conversational live-streams. Professionals and social groups will find ways to monetize and publicize this type of content as micronetworks. Video and audio recordings of online meetings, panels, and presentations (and auto-generated transcripts of them) will become more common as a way to share information.

Politics

I am usually more of a technological determinist, but for the current moment, I believe this is the most important category. We are still exiting an era of defunct political parties that are failing and fragmenting, and making our way into an era of discovery and realignment. For the last few years, each cultural crisis — e.g. Trump’s election, Epstein, this pandemic — has revealed a new set of decrepit institutions. Aside from Yang, there have been very few coherent, new proposals about how government and the economy should be run.

At the same time, Silicon Valley has experienced three massive jolts. The first was San Francisco’s housing crisis, which made tech-native workers aware of political implications of space for the first time. The second was the “techlash,” which left Silicon Valley feeling unfairly blamed for problems in America at large. The third is the current moment, in which East Coast-based journalism, media, and government totally failed to understand and deal with the crisis at hand. This one is the last straw, with online voices mobilizing strongly to critique East Coast cultural hegemony

→ The culture war between the East Coast and West Coast, which has been going on for some time, is now all but over. It has self-evidently been lost by the East Coast. The level of momentum and cultural homogeneity among tech-driven culture is unmatched by East Coast media / finance / old money, an insular culture which merely protects its interests.

→ Silicon Valley is awakening to its political interests and political responsibility. Expect California and SF specifically to create more national-grade politicians. LA and SF’s mayors will become political players at the same level importance as NYC and Chicago’s. Silicon Valley thought leaders will become political players with their own ideological factions.

If Silicon Valley is going to become more involved with politics, what positions will it be taking?

→ I expect Silicon Valley will see itself as high-modernist rebuilders of the new economy, the new “captains of industry” who will put in place a new set of public-private infrastructure and public goods, as well as being much more involved in domestic and foreign policy. This will be a centralizing force, and the “decentralization” movement will be the natural counterculture, absorbing both traditional leftists and traditional libertarians into an ideological agglomeration. We will see the tension between centralization and decentralization play out in new ways, especially as tech platforms become explicitly identified as as public infrastructure.

Death

Edouard Urcades

@fIowerstructure urcad.es

Death (that ever-present event/condition) is not well-represented or ‘generally present’ in the design of public infrastructure, digital or physical or otherwise. Most people’s present infrastructural relationship with death manifests in the form of footnotes, legalese, buried settings menu options, and other similarly sidelined representations. As further ecological instability sets off increasingly vast die-offs, infrastructure will evolve to better present and make use of death.

→ After all is said and done for our present pandemic, many thousands of people will be dead and the living will be burdened with a deep recession. Cheap solutions for end-of-life services will be sought and many will turn to the cheapest infrastructure they know of: the web. Streaming services and asynchronous rites will be used to pay the dead their last respects. People inhabiting the worlds of multiplayer games will find ways to erect monuments in-game to their dead friends they’ve never seen face to face.

→ Venture capital will seed companies that make efficient and novel use of people’s posthumous data. Just as lifestyle product development reached its zenith in the vast proliferation of colorfully branded DTC companies, we’ll soon see an outcropping of companies embedding value back into the death condition: Boutique hardware-accessory production firms embedding human remains into a variety of aesthetic forms, Digital graveyards of all genres, education startups interlinking the gathered knowledge of its dead members, brands creating new social experiences around death pacts, etc.

→ We can look forward to witnessing an infrastructural acknowledgement of the vastness of scale of human death: Initially guised in the form of “public health services”, corporations at the scale of Facebook and Amazon will grow robust services around the handling of the dead, or the soon-to-be dead. In a truly general sense, it’s only a matter of time before the profiles of the dead exceed the amount of living profiles across social networks and companies will develop means by which revenue can be generated from the non-content-producing dead.

→ Corporation-backed affordances for ‘hosting the dead’ will result in everyday people having access to the same technologies that keep Carrie Fisher in suspended animation, forever subject to the whims of profit generation. The everyday influencer will persist past their death, and society will find itself in a position where influential bodies no longer lie in wait to be discovered, but constitute active presences in social networks – virtual human bodies as literal extensions of the advertising–surveillance machine. Virtual influencers will cease to be interesting as the dead-who-still-persist are piloted by lifestyle/PR companies.

Breathe. Read the air. We are all going online in a new way, and we will never entirely leave again. In this new era, cultural literacy is a baseline requirement for making technology, for making policy, for living and for dying. Squad up. The real knowledge work begins now.

Many thanks to Blogger Peer Review for thoughts and feedback.

Subpixel Space

Moral Ecosystems: My Big Idea

Connecting the Dots on American Psychology

On the Evolution of Credit Cultures

Life After Lifestyle

The Cultural Production Service Economy

From Making Goods to Making Culture

Life After Lifestyle

spring-summer-2020

Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool

The Emergence of Paid Communities

Paid Communities Are a New Business Model for Bespoke Social Media

Community, Coordination, Conclusion

Responses

re: garden of forking memes

Towards a Blogger Peer Review

Who gets to contribute to knowledge?

Introducing Quotebacks

Premonition

Culture

Brands

Space

Entertainment

Tools & Platforms

Politics

Death