A culture that thinks like an algorithm also “projects a future that is like the past,” James Bridle explains, because “that which is gathered as data is modelled as the way things are, and then projected forward — with the implicit assumption that things will not radically change or diverge from previous experiences.” In a world reliant on computation to make sense of things, “that which is possible becomes that which is computable.”
I'd love to get some discussion going on this, since I'm writing on an adjacent topic and this will make me feel like I'm actually being very productive on the hexagonal bear:
Do you think there is a path of Resistance within Algorithms/the algorithmically aggregated and cultivated "Internet" of dominant platforms? Like, there's a lot of talk about "building pipelines" and such through collective clicking, do you think that's a real proposition or is it just more captured attention that serves only capital?
Do you think there is a path of Resistance within Algorithms/the algorithmically aggregated and cultivated “Internet” of dominant platforms?
Yes, but not without a large enough and coordinated enough movement to actually hijack the algorithm and build that pipeline. Part of the reason that the Youtube to Fash pipeline exists is because fossil fuel billionaires pump tons of money into right wing media that connects all of those ghouls together - the current alternative, an informal association of center to left individual content creators who sometimes cross over with one another, doesn't stand a chance against a project like that.
Absolutely with you on that, if there was ever a fire of the gods we must steal, it's this shit.
Not too sure what you mean by a rebirthed artisan class - care to elaborate? Non-proletarized workers that have some small form of MoP; less division of labour, something like that?(I'll be off for now but reading it all soon, cheers)
I've seen that Varoufakis talk, it's been on my mind again lately as well. I'm not sure whether it's really non-capitalistic technofeudalism, or just the latest stage of capitalism tbh, but it doesn't matter all that much what we call it anyway. In general, I agree with his observations.
the period of mass produced, cheap crap with thirty different knock off versions will come to an end eventually
Here, I'm... not so sure, honestly. Like, yes, it has to end in light of the hard limits of our biosphere, but I see no mechanism intrinsic to capitalism that would make it end by itself. We have to end it. If not all of capitalism, then that period of mass production, as you call it. It's a waypoint in the struggle, not a thing that will occur whether we fight for it or not - in my view. Regarding self-made stuff, locally as opposed to amazon goods: I really like that vision. There is of course an obvious (and short-sighted) counter-argument, namely that economies of scale are much more efficient than hand-crafted products could ever be, both in terms of time (obviously) and resources (debatable) - but I think that fails to recognize that we don't really need all that much stuff to be happy in the first place; and that a unique item is much more fulfilling (because it's tailored to our specific needs, but also because it is uniquely ours) in a roundabout way. Additionally, contemporary consumerism isn't just killing the planet - it makes people depressed as well; sure there are the short-time highs after buying a treat but it never lasts and just demonstrates to people how they're never gonna be happy - because consumerism is the only pathway to happiness on offer, generally.
An age of artistic renewal, I love that. Ateliers instead of factories, communal workshops instead of service call centers. It reminds me of how training neural nets is as much an art as it is a science; how there's no one way to make a model do a thing you want it to do; how there is quite a lot of intuition going into both, the curation of training data and the cut-off point on where to stop training (to avoid overtraining) - I think there really is a lot to this line of thought of a new artisanry. Maybe that's the classless society, where we're just all artisans in one thing or another; no more bourgeoisie, no more proletariat, just artisans tinkering away at what they need at the moment. All of it more slowly, more calm, more fulfilled.
There's definitely something growing already, agree.
Cheers, it was a pleasure
Alright, so; I'm mostly in your camp - looking back, maybe my OP question was a bit too leading but anyway, I'll try to verbalize why I'm not 100% on the 100% of that attention capture.
The internet, as you mention, is not yet entirely colonized by cookie-clickerish skinner box abominations, articulated entirely towards selling shit and culture war bullshit. While it's a shrinking part, there is still an outside to these gigantic, hegemonic platforms (fb, google/yt, twitter and all that shit), for example this very hexagonal bear we reside on, but also other little sites that try to do their own thing. In general, audiences are not totally captive to big platforms, though they are inert, slow to move to, let's say a YT-alternative like peertube - they, in theory, can make that shift. We've seen it before with the goliath of MySpace becoming a ghost town when everyone moved over to the quirky little upstart facebook. Of course fb is a goliath in its own right nowadays, but it had real underdog energy waybackwhen. Same with Digg and Reddit. Of course it isn't exactly "Resistance" to switch from one capitalist platform to another, but it shows that these platforms can indeed be dethroned from their perceived cultural importance, and relatively quickly too.
Let's get back to algorithms; let's see them as purposive systems - what's their purpose? They are obviously pretty central to a site's (or app's - TikTok!) functioning and overall value. Somehow they manage to output profit from the input of raw attention. Let's skip forward and call them control systems; they control audience attention and they do so in various ways and towards various ends - BUT they are always limited to a specific platform. Users, real human participants, are not. We're not in an entirely closed system; sure there's the hellsite of twitter on my screen, but there's also a YT-tab, a twitch stream running and a hexbear comment section going over here. These attention control systems are all in competition with each other, referring to each other by necessity and while that may make them more competent on aggregate on account of them being continuously refined by feedback and more structural patches - they are also imperfect, flawed, forever unfinished. I think this permeability of audience attention across various sites and platforms offers at least a gap in the proverbial machine. The question being, can you throw a wrench into it? You can certainly game these systems, by buying artifical-but-human-coded clicks for example; buy a million clicks on your new album, have it go viral through recommenders and the clicks will pay for themselves. Of course, this requires resources not necessarily available to a theoretical resistance.
Most of, maybe all, of the internet is preoccupied with highly engaging culture war bullshit, funneling into some form of consumerism. After all, that's the monetization strategy for all capitalist platforms: ads, one way or another - leading to commerce. Now, there's some differentiation to be made here: While the platform runs on ads, the content itself and the content's creators also run on ads, but differently - brand deals, sponsorships and all that. Not much of a difference at first glance, but it lays bare the fact that the (economic) interests of platform providers and content creators are not aligned perfectly, they can even diverge drastically in some cases. This may lead to creators dropping out of a platform, moving to a different one or even banding together to try and start their own thing (e.g. Nebula) - all still in a capitalist framework of course, but already we can see some forms of subversion emerging; a way that things could be different somehow - maybe even radically different. Hexbear is a radical re-envisioning of what reddit could be, for example. Sure, dunking on twitter screenshots (there's that permeability of audience attention again) isn't exactly political action, but we're doing pretty good on the theory-side of the struggle on this little island in the internet - And if anyone has shown that theory can become a material force, it's Marx himself.
Overall, I see an immense emancipatory potential in these systems. Sure, they are currently articulated entirely in line with capital - but they don't have to be forever.
Anyways, I'll end it here for now, let me know what you think. This has gotten away from me a bit, sorry for the length.
I don't know if online forums and stuff are really gonna be any kind of crazy new platform that will change anything more than it is now (it's changing a lot of stuff right now though).
However (as a programmer) I do think it would be cool to build alternative services to ones that currently rely on software designed around commercial use cases (and I keep saying this over and over on here), but instead specifically tailored to more organizational left wing use cases. For example, most websites hosting left-wing content are probably being hosted on the same big web hosting platforms, using regular software like WordPress for content management. I think that's perfectly fine for the most part, but it would be nice to build up more of a knowledge and resource base for making entirely custom and potentially self-hosted websites. hexbear.net is like that, although it isn't really "secure" because it uses Cloudflare as a content delivery network. Of course it's also probably easier for feds to infiltrate and mess that kind of thing up since big software projects have more professional scrutiny over code that gets integrated.
I think news websites and messaging applications could be more independent. Stuff that would be useful to socialists/communists in other countries would also be good. Not really to change people's behavior or anything, but to create internet tools that left-wing movements rely on more, and make them easily auditable and modifiable. I don't think they need to be radically different. Hexbear.net/Lemmy is a good example. It's basically a Reddit clone that uses more modern web features and can be self-hosted. Self-hosting is the most important thing, not that it's like "distributed" or something. Although for messaging platforms you'd want better end-to-end encryption and so on. Stuff that could basically be useful to DSA chapters and things like that. Websites that are good over low-bandwidth and metered connections would also be good.
Agree with all of your points. Just to elaborate though, when I was talking about radically different systems, I was thinking of better, more transparent, ideally user-operated platforms for the short-term, but for the long-term I was thinking more about stuff like Urbit; radical re-imaginings of how a computer and an internet could function.
I've really got no deeper understanding of Urbit and I don't mean to hinge this point on that one implementation of this OS+Meshnet-thingy, but it does look like something that could grow to be something significant.
That Urbit thing looks pretty unique. It seems very esoteric though and kinda suspicious since it involves Ethereum stuff and it sounds like you can sell your urbit stars or whatever. It also sounds like the original creator is one of those weird right-libertarians or something weirder lol.
Yea, it's not really what is needed, but it certainly is something different - and I think it's at least going in the right direction.
That's the thing with all these crypto peeps; some of them certainly try to actually do cool shit with the tech. Still, it's often misguided, and it often is just an expression of how they think capitalism isn't capitalistic enough; free market radicalism and all that shit. But they're certainly building... something. It's often disgusting, usually outright predatory grift and not exactly towards any form of emancipation - but it is something. It's there, it does end up becoming something real sometimes.
I am too lazy and tired to talk about this now, but I am VERY interested in any literature/other you might have on this topic.
I'm very much still piecing this stuff together for myself right now, but I'll see if I can aggregate a shortlist of recommended readings on the topic for you. The problem is that there are little bits and pieces here and there, but so far I really haven't found a worthwhile text concerning itself with the overall phenomenon of The Algorithm of The Internet (as opposed to algorithm a or b on site x or y) - which is why I'm trying to write it, I guess. Theory-wise I've found Stafford Beer immensely helpful in a 'break it down to the basics'-kinda way, though Deleuze and more specifically process ontology are a close second.
I've also been reading Byung-Chul Han recently, he's getting pretty close to what I'm trying to write - but he's incredibly pessimistic about any form of resistance, he's venturing very close to 'phone bad, book good' territory and he's overall just a little bit of a liberal, I guess. Still, if you want an easy to read, short little diagnosis of where we're at, you may find his 'Psychopolitics' of some value or his newest one, 'Infokratie' (not sure if it has an English translation yet, probably not).
The "innocent reddit lib" to "evil totalitarian tankie" r/ChapoTrapHouse pipeline definitely worked on me. Although I don't think online personalities are part of that at all. YouTubers and twitch.tv streamers at most provide an alternative for people who are into that stuff that isn't so toxic and right-wing, which is valuable. But they all seem like such idiots (not that I'm free of idiocy). Probably most online stuff is unimportant in the grand scheme of things (but it's good when these personalities tie stuff into actual things going on the US).
I think the content of this article is pretty interesting too. I think the best thing would be to create compelling online services that don't have algorithmic stuff mixed into them. Or at least create algorithms that are transparent. Hexbear has a "Sort" thing like Reddit, which has "Active", "Hot", and "Top" which could use more clarification when you select them, what to expect from them. The best systems are ones that don't require anything algorithmic. Twitter has been trying to reduce people's usage of "latest tweets first" without success I think. Having the ordering of tweets be entirely chronological and free from algorithmic recommendations is really nice. Of course, there's still algorithmic stuff elsewhere on Twitter, but the twitter feed isn't really influencing user behavior the same way other websites do. Might be a small reason why Twitter can be more sane than Facebook (although I've never used Facebook). You're still in a bubble, since you only follow people who you agree with, but the idea of "expanding" the "perspectives" you're exposed to is mostly just media outlet talking point stuff that isn't super relevant, although it's obviously a thing.
Maybe designing mass communication systems where things don't get lost in the noise would be the ideal future. Or ones that give people a fair amount of publicity for their ideas when they want it. The solution in the case of stuff like Spotify would be to remove algorithmic stuff from it and just recommend things in a transparent way. Stuff could still show up that's "related" to stuff you listened to. But it could also recommend stuff that's popular in different parts of the world or country, or which is in a category you don't have exposure to (I guess kinda like that "expanding perspectives" thing lol).
Yea, I think on some level pipelines are definitely a thing. We're all constantly becoming, makes sense that media consumption and media consumption choices have some (complex, reciprocal, probably not straight-forward, though still real) relationship to how we do become, who we are after time has passed. I figure we've always already been in some form of tube of becoming, it's just that this complex web of 'becoming-tubes' around us is getting reduced in complexity; the accumulating and stratifying forces of capital is merging these organic becoming-tubes to fewer and fewer pipelines, making them more easily perceivable as amorphous forces/objects influencing our becoming.
In general, I'm very sympathetic to the 'Internet but with less/no algos'-sentiment, but I don't think that's feasible at all anymore. The incredible amount of content produced constantly makes some form of aggregation absolutely necessary or else the site would be unusable and unattractive, you'd drown in bad content nobody wants to watch. And the sheer volume of that content is too much to be handled by humans, it must -to some extend at least- be automated, at least for sites that rely heavily on user generated content, like YT. Twitter is indeed doing something a bit differently, and it very well could be the fact that it relies less heavily on recommendation systems and more on actual human recommendation for feed curation. While Twitter has some sort of 'frontpage feed', it's really not why users make accounts there, I think - it's real people pulling them to the platform by their presence there; not necessarily so much the content itself.
Or ones that give people a fair amount of publicity for their ideas when they want it.
I kinda love that idea, reminds me of that old promise of ten minutes of fame, but I'll have to think about that for a bit. My first intuition is that attention is scarce, and this will probably run in the face of (attention) economic considerations on closer inspection
