Scamander looming
Recently I've written about the flow of content in feeds and the algorithms that facilitate it. The algorithms were once simple and general: Programming directors at television stations would organize the schedules of shows, and ad breaks would be interspersed at more or less regular intervals. The flow wasn't adapted to individuals; rather individuals were invited to go with the flow. If they did, they could feel included in the zeitgeist, they could feel as if their tastes were within familiar bounds, they could see themselves as "normal." Moreover they could acquire a familiarity with TV's genres and narrative patterns and harvest a consistent amount of pleasure from that mastery. These pleasures derive in part from the implicit sense that they are shared social structures, common experiences, touch points. The genres and narratives organize experience into patterns that one assumes many other people will affirm. Even the pleasure of rejecting these narratives is sharpened, as what one is trying to resist is clearer.
With forms of social media, the model has been inverted: Algorithms adapt the flow of content according to data collected about the individual, with the implicit aim of solidifying the relevance of that data to advertisers. The content and the ads work in harmony to further pigeonhole individuals, narrow their sense of possibility to the kinds of inventory that is on hand or could be cheaply developed. Targeted ads and content are meant, above all else, to make users more targetable.
This changes the sort of pleasures users learn to harvest from these platforms: The pleasures are oriented toward self-discovery, toward seeing oneself reflected in content, to experiencing oneself at the center of a media universe, to being individuated. One's sense of individuality becomes more closely tied to the sorts of media one consumes (and the kinds of ads and other discourses one sees); it needs constant reaffirmation though continual acts of consumption.
At the same time, one can no longer consume media and feel automatically included in a general population or a sensibility, as in the fabled "monocultures" of 20th century mass media. The content selected for users is not normative in the conventional ways; it can often be deeply antisocial, as with conspiratorial rabbit holes and processes of incremental radicalization, as algorithms serve up increasingly extreme material that would have provided no pleasure within older forms of media that invited imagining the pleasures of consensus. "Extreme" content makes sense as a palpable expression of "deepening" individuality.
That is to say, a sense of "community" is not intrinsic to most of the modes of contemporary media consumption. If we want to derive a sense of social belonging from it, community has to be foregrounded at the level of content or mimicked in the forms of interaction that platforms prescribe. I think influencer-style content has emerged to meet these sorts of needs; it exerts a kind of centrifugal force amid the algorithmic feeds' general centripetal pull. Influencer content still reflects how targeting blurs ads and content together, but it also displaces the target, reintroduces vicariousness (and all its pleasures) into data-driven platforms that otherwise work against it.
Anyway, all that is preface to a claim I wanted to make about flows and livestreams. Livestreams seem to me to be the next step in media consumption when the pleasures afforded by content flows in feeds are no longer enough, either because they become too individuated and alienating, or they lose their affective intensity, or they no longer are capable of sustaining a sense of identity because they aren't continuous enough; they leave too many gaps between items of content through which the self can fall or start to disintegrate.
Influencers seem subject to the same drift; they must eventually become streamers, modeling continual media production and consumption as a possible way to reconcile the production of a self and belonging to community. This is ultimately their main purpose, regardless of whatever specific niche they otherwise serve. They are defined by the ability to produce enough content to keep up with viewers' insatiable demand for it, the demand for a streaming self in itself, if that makes any sense.
If we all are made to feel that we must ourselves be a continual content stream in order to be a viable person, then influencers are guides to how this can be achieved. Influencers show how the self can be serially produced as "human capital" (as neoliberalized economies demand) while grounding that production within what appear to be social values. One produces the self for others and on that basis is admitted into a community; one doesn't presume inclusion already or acquire it passively by being among the masses who share a culture.
But what sort of community is that? In Blockchain Chicken Farm And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside, Xiaowei Wang describes a multilevel marketing scheme involving "pearl parties":
As a pearl party participant, you can watch on Facebook Live, and you can also reserve an oyster by filling in an order form before the scheduled party. Reserving the oyster is around US$20, and you keep whatever pearl is inside the oyster. You get to watch as the oyster is opened for you on Facebook Live during the broadcast by the hostess. She typically calls herself a “pearl consultant” for a multilevel marketing company that distributes these oysters. As a consultant, she purchases the wish pearl oysters from the MLM company up front, and there’s pressure for her to sell as many as she can.
As Wang notes, this kind of commerce has thrived with widening economic inequality, the undermined social safety net, advent of social media, the development of the influencer industry, and the enhanced immediacy of affective consumerism. The feeling of welcome within a community blurs into the practice of buying the appropriate goods that signal belonging, and at the same time, the vicariousness and aspirational aspects of consumerism are sustained by the access one has to other people's lives, the carefully orchestrated intimacy. "Hostesses make the person whose oyster is about to be opened feel so, so special," Wang explains. "And in a time when you rarely get to feel special, doesn’t it feel so good to hear that someone cares about you?”
On a material level, consumerism is often disappointing; goods rarely live up to the emotional promises that are bound up with them ever more tightly with ever more immersive and social forms of marketing. But the consumerist rituals of participation — the brief moment in which a purchase really does seem to address a lack, produce a kind of recognition, secure a sense of inclusion or access — seem more pervasive and compelling than ever. That is, the fantasies intrinsic to consumerism have been strengthened by the new forms of media dedicated to them: the platforms that have been transformed our "social networks" into vectors for ceaseless propaganda about lifestyles, about what it means to be a success, to be cared about, to be worthy of attention.
Wang details how Chinese "KOLs" — "key opinion leaders," another term for "influencer" — are recruited to sell pearls and other kinds of goods, often through the use of livestreaming:
Livestream continues to be central across a range of new business models. Shopping sites like Taobao.com now incorporate livestream directly onto the platform. Other platforms like Kuaishou now have built-in stores. A far more personalized, addictive version of the home-shopping network, livestream blurs the line between selling a product and selling a feeling. A good seller builds an energetic rapport with the viewer, just like Kristie with her Krazy Kultured pearls.
One might assume that livestreams are "addictive" because they are intimate and entertaining enough to make people tolerate the constant salesmanship. But it may be that they are addictive precisely because they "blur the line between selling a product and selling a feeling" — they normalize and glamorize the inescapable and horrific reality that every kind of relationship has been subsumed by the market. All feelings are for sale. If they are not for sale, we may not recognize them as feelings. The best place not to be blindsided by this is on a hard-sell livestream, enthralled by a multilevel marketer trying to sell you garbage with love.
Wang points out that “the popularity of livestream is deeply tied to your income bracket. Few elite urbanites, whose lives are dictated by the rhythms of white-collar work, consistently watch livestream, although most will use the Douyin (TikTok) app to watch short, recorded videos.” This places streaming on a continuum with TikTok, positioning it as the next step beyond, the place one turns to for consolation or "cruel optimism" when one is sufficiently desperate or disempowered — as one begins to slide down the class hierarchy. The popularity of streamers would then testify not necessarily to the quality or interest of their performances but to other forms of media generally losing their power to distract and beguile us. If the ideology of consumerism provides us with the only forms of pleasure we can still imagine, we depend on the kinds of media that can convince us that those pleasures are still worth fantasizing about, that there is still joy there. Livestreaming seems like the most strenuous and desperate attempt yet to keep those fantasies alive.
The ideology for the capitalist good life and for the market-based society is not strong, compelling, or convincing in itself. Only constant, streaming reinforcement can protect the pleasures and sense of community that this ideology seems to structure even as, in practice, market society undermines whatever dreams we might have of relating to one another without an insulating layer of mutual exploitation.
If multi-level marketing seems more appealing to more and more people, it may because multilevel marketers come across as being realistic about what social life is now for — so many pearls of wisdom. They model the kind of community that exploitation binds together.
***
Multi-level marketing is one way of looking at the sort of "community" that a society fully subsumed by capitalism permits. Fan communities are another. As the practices of celebrity and influencer converge, they may even be said to be the same thing. The celebrity is at the top of the pyramid scheme, and fans use social media platforms to sort themselves into a hierarchy that elaborates the different levels of commitment, the different opportunities to buy access, belonging, and proximity to success while extending for another cycle the viability of the pleasures of fandom. One way to forestall disappoint is to posit another level of investment that will redeem all the sunken effort.
This article by Joe Coscarelli in the New York Times about fan culture presents it as a kind of mutant nationalism or proto-fascism: fans "pledge allegiance to their favorites like the most rabid political partisans or religious followers. They organize to win awards show polls, boost sales and raise money like grass roots activists. And they band together to pester — or harass, and even dox — those who may dare to slight the stars they have chosen to align themselves with." The policing of an elective orthodoxy becomes more important than the celebrities themselves, offering fans the pleasures of absolutism and intolerance at a micro, everyday level. But this commitment to intolerance appears as self-assertion: "I’ve never seen anyone insincere when it comes to BTS,” one fan of the K-pop group tells Coscarelli. “No one is forcing us to do anything. It feels like we’re promoting BTS, but we are also promoting our own voices, our own struggles, our own hope for a better world.”
Celebrities in turn have begun to exploit this power over fans, in part because this exploitation is part of the substance of media consumption; fans know they are fans only when they are used in this way. Coscarelli writes, "As artists have come to recognize their direct influence over swaths of their online public — sometimes siccing them on detractors, or at least failing to call them off — they have also come to rely on their constant consumption, especially in the streaming era."
If individual streams are essentially worthless, there is value in amalgamating fans into an attention bloc. Fans too derive reward from being shaped into a community that can exert power. Both depend on continual heroic consumption — the structure requires something that can be continually produced to be consumed without depletion, something like livestreams. Instead of a cycle of circulation that valorizes goods and makes profit realizable, circulation becomes a continual interaction with goods — perpetual immersion. The stream becomes a short circuit; slower circulation cycles become uncompetitive, worthless.
The "streaming era" may end up applying to everything, not just media. Or to put that another way, all products are streaming media, given the possibility of orchestrating "engagement" around anything. Every product will need to produce its own TikTok genre devoted to it, if not a Peloton-ish fan community, and each of these communities will tilt toward some sort of combative, arbitrary orthodoxy, some multi-level-marketing-like commitment to proselytization. Subjectivities must be adjusted to constant engagement in consumeristic processes. Only if people are always in the process of consuming can any commodities be profitable. All consumers will follow the path of influencers toward livestreams, which will seem like the most plausible means of developing an "authentic" self, of making consumerism pay in pleasure, of belonging to a community of any sort.
When I think about what I am trying to accomplish by writing this sort of thing, it feels very self-defeating. The implication of my own claims is that these posts will come across as meaningless unless they are sutured to a marketing infrastructure. But I hope they don't come across that way. I'd rather have the possibility that you are reading this invalidate my arguments than be right.