The Second To Last Social Media Post: Is This Mass Media?
Coming Soon: A Historiography of My Soul / Leaving Soon: Mono-Cultural Asphyxiation
A scene from a brand new episode of: The X Files
(On Fox, Sundays 9 pm est)
Mulder: “Social Media is mass media, Scully. The content that —generally unpaid—users create is harnessed via algorithms by advertisers in order to reach consumers. This is pretty much how network television worked too, but this is more sophisticated and more exploitative.
Scully (crackin wise): At least creators of tv shows get paid.
Mulder: They steal all of their ideas, Scully. Mainstream culture steals and annihilates.
Scully: That seems a little extreme, Mulder. Mainstream culture isn’t a monolithic thing. That’s not how bodies of water work. The stream is fed by other streams, that stream feeds a river, a river feeds an ocean.
Mulder: But we can geo-engineer all of that, right? Isn’t that the promise of civilized mankind, Scully? Transform the earth in order to live more comfortably… or so I’ve been told.
Scully: What are you saying, Mulder? That just as we’ve made canals and moved rivers to suit our needs, so to have we—
Mulder: Destroyed the ecosystems of the mind, Scully. What once was a psychic bounty of streams feeding rivers feeding rivers feeding oceans, the oceans themselves a series of complex currents and intensities—
Scully: Here we go again. I think it’s fair to say that our global problems, climate change, mass extinction—
Mulder: Various systems of inequality. Powers harnessed to bring harm to people. Ideologies of selfhood—
Scully: Let’s not start with that, Mulder. We have a case to solve here. What’s your point?
Mulder: The Algorithm, Scully, the Algorithm. Or whatever mechanism the engineers have set up—I don’t pretend to totally understand how it works here, I’m not the scientists after all. But your science is not only influenced by your faith but synonymous with it. Our systems of rational inquiry, our science, grew mostly from the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Scully: I can separate my faith and my rationality. I can separate different parts of my self and different parts of how I experience the world. I can separate to better live on this earth, even. Perhaps science has taken some time to extract itself from certain ideological blind spots; science isn’t a monolithic thing either, but a continual open inquiry, resistant to dogma. But why are we having this conversation again?
Mulder: What do Algorithms do? They sift through user content and bring it to the top, or bury it as irrelevant, based on its ability to create profit, which is done mostly by giving advertisers access to peoples’ data and/or their ears and eyeballs. The visibility of what you find on these sites is determined wholly by these forces.
Scully: Yes, none of this is shocking. I think it should give people more pause than it seems to. Obviously if more people were critical of these medias, we wouldn’t have these medias. People have agreed to this, that’s the basic social contract.
Mulder: That’s outdated liberalism, Scully. A misunderstanding of the wild, the State of Nature.
Scully: Advertising plays on our need for conformity, but I don’t think it creates that conformity. It exploits it though, certainly, so as long as there is anything we can agree on, we will have those who seek to influence our behavior through exploiting certain bonds or pacts we’ve made—
Mulder: Now you’ve lost me, Scully.
Scully: If the way a person thinks and acts can be simplified into an ideology, it can be used to sell something to someone.
Mulder: I think you’re making my point for me.
Scully: But these are still choices made by a choosing agent.
Mulder: Unless not. Unless the choices are artificially constrained. Unless the choices are really manipulations by a lopsided power structure. In an Engineered System, Content is tailored to the user based on what kind of consumer they are; you are shown what you need to be shown to fit into whatever marketable niche makes sense out of you, as a consumer. Maybe we’d like to think we’re complicated humans, but this system largely works because we are not. Or: we’re not allowed to be; the engines of mass media create the expressions of our identity—
Scully: Unless we are creative in our expression of identity.
Mulder: Who is? Did you create your gender? Your species, even? Were you allowed to create your Self in that sense?
Scully: We’re not operating in isolation here, Mulder. We are not the only agents making decisions about the world, and to some extent I’d say it actually does matter what other people think of you.
Mulder: But what if what other people think of you isn’t just a thought, but an attack, a threat to you? We become who they tell us we are out of fear, Scully. Fear does all sorts of crazy things to the head, chemically, doesn’t it?
Scully: Yes, evolution has created a system that is remarkably aware. Anyway, let’s get back on topic here. The Algorithm. A thing you can, I’d argue, outsmart.
Mulder: We can rebel, maybe—maybe—not against some biological constants; but we can certainly rebel against social constructs. We can rebel and we can be punished. Even this rebellion is built into the Algorithm. It feeds from even our resistance to it. This doesn’t mean the resistance won’t eventually break it. I think in the long run the Algorithm is self destructing, but this could play out over centuries, maybe even eons. It may be the Algorithm of the Divine and Conscious Universe—
Scully: I’m getting dizzy, Mulder.
A Later Scene…
Scully and Mulder visit a Witch, but Scully is suspicious of the witch’s abilities.
Witch: Some come here for mass media detoxification. Our understanding of American culture, our ability to engage with it and be a part of it, is overly dictated by a very small group of people, relatively speaking. We let advertisers and multinational corporations, the tech industry, the entertainment industry (including tv news), and the publishing industry decide what counts as important. None of these industries, in my assessment, have earned their place as cultural leaders. They stole it from us.
Mulder: And most of them are nowhere near where most people actually live, physically, geographically—
Scully: Well, I don’t know about that, Mulder. Our cultures rise from the most heavily populated regions of the planet. Our global cultures are a lot more diverse than you give them credit for being. You want to claim a mono-culture where I see thriving many many cultures.
Mulder: Thriving? How often does the TV news talk about something in your neighborhood that you actually have to deal with on a daily basis, some aspect of your life as you live it every day? How often are your dis-satisfactions with that world reflected—
Scully: Pretty damn often. Because I’m a white woman. But less often than you, Mulder.
Mulder: They pay no attention to what is happening in my psychic neighborhood, Scully, they pay no attention to what is happening to me and the people I care about, or if they do pay attention, it’s not exactly positive.
Scully: Your fringe beliefs don’t have you marginalized Mulder, you’ve chosen that path.
Witch: Has he? Or is it written in the stars?
Scully: Culture is what we make everyday and what we choose to care about. Why do we spend so much time caring about that which people hundreds of miles away think we should care about? Maybe some of them truly have a finger on the pulse of things. Maybe they are worth listening to.
Witch: The Mono-Culture is not my culture. The reality they describe is not the reality I experience.
Scully: You have networks of people who more-or-less believe what you believe. You’re a thriving community these days, Witches.
Witch: I think you mis-see who is the Witch and who is the Impostor…
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When Will This Substack Disappear?
I don’t know what to do with all of my writing here, so it’ll stay for a while. I won’t be deleting the Substack entirely. But there will be no new “content” after this and a couple more posts designed to direct everyone out.
Others have left Substack more quickly and thoroughly but they are also people who spend a lot more time online and have thorough knowledge of online alternatives. So far, I find the alternatives lacking; the Internet as a “space” has been swallowed by the mono-culture, by corporate forces, by frankly authoritarian (if not downright fascist) forces. All “alternatives” feel like they will eventually prove corrupted.
The Revolution Will Not Be Online.
My publishing efforts will transition fully to print media; I plan on returning to zine-making for this. I would like to be able to distribute this work to all of you (that want such a thing) but there are still some things I need to figure out. Until then, I will return to sending out an emailed newsletter.
The world appears to move fast but this is sorta an illusion. The technological advances of the last few decades are in line with the general thrust of the industrial revolution, and when understood historically, are far less impressive than the acolytes make it seem. We’ve been dazzled by new tech for centuries, and it has been changing with remarkable swiftness for centuries; some of those changes are superficial and some are not. Some upend our lives inevitably and some upend our lives only because we think they do, we believe those who tell us that this changes everything.
We are still only animals building things out of the stuff of the earth.