[Plura-list] Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media

[Cory Doctorow]

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

This coming Monday, Jun 7, I'm helping Terry Miles launch his debut
novel RABBITS:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/terry-miles-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-discusses-rabbits-tickets-154613644573

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

Today's links

* Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media: The failure of "From the
Desk of Donald J. Trump" and linear programming.

* This day in history: 2006, 2020

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🤏🏽 Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media

In William Gibson's 1992 novel "Idoru," a media executive describes his
company's core audience:

"Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually
hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I
like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a
week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a
double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it
sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting.
It has no mouth...no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of
murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a
universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."

It's an astonishingly great passage, not just for the image it evokes,
but for how it captures the character of the speaker and his contempt
for the people who made his fortune.

It's also a beautiful distillation of the 1990s anxiety about TV's role
in a societal "dumbing down," that had brewed for a long time, at least
since the Nixon-JFK televised debates, whose outcome was widely
attributed not to JFK's ideas, but to Nixon's terrible TV manner.

Neil Postman's 1985 "Amusing Ourselves To Death" was a watershed here,
comparing the soundbitey Reagan-Dukakis debates with the long,
rhetorically complex Lincoln-Douglas debates of the previous century.

(Incidentally, when I finally experienced those debates for myself,
courtesy of the 2009 BBC America audiobook, I was more surprised by
Lincoln's unequivocal, forceful repudiations of slavery abolition than
by the rhetoric's nuance)

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/01/20/lincoln-douglas-debate-audiobook-civics-history-and-rhetoric-lesson-in-16-hours/

"Media literacy" scholarship entered the spotlight, and its left flank -
epitomized by Chomsky's 1988 "Manufacturing Consent" - claimed that an
increasingly oligarchic media industry was steering society, rather than
reflecting it.

Thus, when the internet was demilitarized and the general public started
trickling - and then rushing - to use it, there was a widespread hope
that we might break free of the tyranny of concentrated, linear
programming (in the sense of "what's on," and "what it does to you").

Much of the excitement over Napster wasn't about getting music for free
- it was about the mix-tapification of all music, where your custom
playlists would replace the linear album.

Likewise Tivo, whose ad-skipping was ultimately less important than the
ability to watch the shows you liked, rather than the shows that were on.

Blogging, too: the promise was that a community of reader-writers could
assemble a daily "newsfeed" that reflected their idiosyncratic interests
across a variety of sources, surfacing ideas from other places and even
other times.

The heady feeling of the time is hard to recall, honestly, but there was
a thrill to getting up and reading the news that you chose, listening to
a playlist you created, then watching a show you picked.

And while there were those who fretted about the "Daily Me" (what we
later came to call the "filter bubble") the truth was that this kind of
active media creation/consumption ranged far more widely than the
monopolistic media did.

The real "bubble" wasn't choosing your own programming - it was everyone
turning on their TV on Thursday nights to Friends, Seinfeld and The
Simpsons.

The optimism of the era is best summarized in a taxonomy that grouped
media into two categories: "lean back" (turn it on and passively consume
it) and "lean forward" (steer your media consumption with a series of
conscious decisions that explores a vast landscape).

Lean-forward media was intensely sociable: not just because of the
distributed conversation that consisted of blog-reblog-reply, but also
thanks to user reviews and fannish message-board analysis and
recommendations.

I remember the thrill of being in a hotel room years after I'd left my
hometown, using Napster to grab rare live recordings of a band I'd grown
up seeing in clubs, and striking up a chat with the node's proprietor
that ranged fondly and widely over the shows we'd both seen.

But that sociability was markedly different from the "social" in social
media. From the earliest days of Myspace and Facebook, it was clear that
this was a sea-change, though it was hard to say exactly what was
changing and how.

Around the time Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, a close friend a blazing
argument with a TV executive who insisted that the internet was just a
passing fad: that the day would come when all these online kids grew up,
got beaten down by work and just wanted to lean back.

To collapse on the sofa and consume media that someone else had
programmed for them, anaesthetizing themselves with passive media that
didn't make them think too hard.

This guy was obviously wrong - the internet didn't disappear - but he
was also right about the resurgence of passive, linear media.

But this passive media wasn't the "must-see TV" of the 80s and 90s.

Rather, it was the passivity of the recommendation algorithm, which
created a per-user linear media feed, coupled with mechanisms like
"endless scroll" and "autoplay," that incinerated any trace of an active
role for the "consumer" (a very apt term here).

It took me a long time to figure out exactly what I disliked about
algorithmic recommendation/autoplay, but I knew I hated it. The reason
my 2008 novel LITTLE BROTHER doesn't have any social media? Wishful
thinking. I was hoping it would all die in a fire.

Today, active media is viewed with suspicion, considered synonymous with
Qanon-addled boomers who flee Facebook for Parler so they can stan their
favorite insurrectionists in peace, freed from the tyranny of the dread
shadowban.

But I'm still on team active media. I would rather people actively
choose their media diets, in a truly sociable mode of consumption *and*
production, than leaning back and getting fed whatever is served up by
the feed.

Today on Wired, Duke public policy scholar Philip M Napoli writes about
lean forward and lean back in the context of Trump's catastrophic
failure to launch an independent blog, "From the Desk of Donald J Trump."

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-trumps-failed-blog-proves-he-was-just-howling-into-the-void/

In a nutshell, Trump started a blog which he grandiosely characterized
as a replacement for the social media monopolists who'd kicked him off
their platforms. Within a month, he shut it down.

While Trump claimed the shut-down was all part of the plan, it's
painfully obvious that the real reason was that no one was visiting his
website.

Now, there are many possible, non-exclusive explanations for this.

For starters, it was a very bad social media website. It lacked even
rudimentary social tools. The Washington Post called it "a primitive
one-way loudspeaker," noting its lack of per-post comments, a decades
old commonplace.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/21/trump-online-traffic-plunge/

Trump paid (or more likely, stiffed) a grifter crony to build the site
for him, and it shows: the "Like" buttons didn't do anything, the
video-sharing buttons created links to nowhere, etc. From the Desk...
was cursed at birth.

But Napoli's argument is that even if Trump had built a good blog, it
would have failed. Trump has a highly motivated cult of tens of millions
of people - people who deliberately risked death to follow him, some
even ingesting fish-tank cleaner and bleach at his urging.

The fact that these cult-members were willing to risk their lives, but
not endure poor web design, says a lot about the nature of the Trump
cult, and its relationship to passive media.

The Trump cult is a "push media" cult, simultaneously completely
committed to Trump but unwilling to do much to follow him.

That's the common thread between Fox News (and its successors like OANN)
and MAGA Facebook.

And it echoes the despairing testimony of the children of Fox cultists,
that their boomer parents consume endless linear TV, turning on Fox from
the moment they arise and leaving it on until they fall asleep in front
of it (also, reportedly, how Trump spent his presidency).

Napoli says that Trump's success on monopoly social media platforms and
his failure as a blogger reveals the role that algorithmically derived,
per-user, endless scroll linear media played in the ascendancy of his views.

It makes me think of that TV exec and his prediction of the internet's
imminent disappearance (which, come to think of it, is not so far off
from my own wishful thinking about social media's disappearance in
Little Brother).

He was absolutely right that this century has left so many of us
exhausted, wanting nothing more than the numbness of lean-back, linear
feeds.

But up against that is another phenomenon: the resurgence of active
political movements.

After a 12-month period that saw widescale civil unrest, from last
summer's BLM uprising to the bizarre storming of the capital, you can't
really call this the golden age of passivity.

While Fox and OANN consumption might be the passive daily round of one
of Idoru's "vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry
organisms craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed," that is in no way
true of Qanon.

Qanon is an active pastime, a form of collaborative storytelling with
all the mechanics of the Alternate Reality Games that the lean-forward
media advocates who came out of the blogging era love so fiercely:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/06/no-vitiated-air/#other-hon

Meanwhile, the "clicktivism" that progressive cynics decried as useless
performance a decade ago has become an active contact sport, welding
together global movements from Occupy to BLM that use the digital to
organize the highly physical.

That's the paradox of lean-forward and lean-back: sometimes, the things
you learn while leaning back make you lean forward - in fact, they might
just get you off the couch altogether.

I think that Napoli is onto something. The fact that Trump's cultists
didn't follow him to his crummy blog tells us that Trump was an effect,
not a cause (something many of us suspected all along, as he's clearly
neither bright nor competent enough to inspire a movement).

But the fact that "cyberspace keeps everting" (to paraphrase "Spook
Country," another William Gibson novel) tells us that passive media
consumption isn't a guarantee of passivity in the rest of your life (and
sometimes, it's a guarantee of the opposite).

And it clarifies the role that social media plays in our discourse - not
so much a "radicalizer" as a means to corral likeminded people together
without them having to do much. Within those groups are those who are
poised for action, or who can be moved to it.

The ease with which these people find one another doesn't produce a
deterministic outcome. Sometimes, the feed satisfies your urge for
change ("clicktivism"). Sometimes, it fuels it ("radicalizing").

Notwithstanding smug media execs, the digital realm equips us to
"express our mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire" by
doing much more than "changing the channels on a universal remote" - for
better and for worse.


_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🤏🏽 This day in history

#15yrsago UK Parliament report damns DRM
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/launch-of-the-apig-report-on-drm/

#1yrago Big Tech is good at being big
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/05/afrofuturism/#at-scale

#1yrago The unsatisfying history of obscenity
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/05/afrofuturism/#popehat

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🤏🏽 Colophon

Currently writing:

* Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. Friday's
progress: 259 words (4191 words total).

* A Little Brother short story about remote invigilation.  PLANNING

* A nonfiction book about excessive buyer-power in the arts, co-written
with Rebecca Giblin, "The Shakedown."  FINAL EDITS

* A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause."  FINISHED

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues."  FINISHED

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (Part 06)
https://craphound.com/nonficbooks/destroy/2021/05/10/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-part-06/

Upcoming appearances:

* In conversation with David Dayen (Second Life Book Club), Jun 4,
http://www.draxtor.com/sl-book-club-coming-up/corydavid

* Book launch for Terry Miles's Rabbits (Book Soup), Jun 7,
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/terry-miles-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-discusses-rabbits-tickets-154613644573

Recent appearances:

* Get Your News On With Ron/Ron Placone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hqdFqfvl00

* Seize the Means of Computation, Consensus 2021
https://www.coindesk.com/cory-doctorow-web3-seize-means-of-computation

* How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism:
https://cfe.ryerson.ca/key-resources/podcasts/how-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-seize-means-computation

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
(print edition:
https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907)
(signed copies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

Upcoming books:

* The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics,
Beacon Press 2022

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🤏🏽 How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/web/accounts/303320

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/ (Latest Medium column: "I Quit," a
meditation on smoking, the climate emergency and denialism
https://doctorow.medium.com/i-quit-9ae7b6010c99)

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and
advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion
Guy" DeVilla

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/attachments/20210605/c5f9048f/attachment.sig>