The Age of the Teleputer
After Logan Paul's "suicide forest" video and his subsequent apology made the rounds of outrage, I was reminded of Life After Television, a 1990 book by right-wing hack George Gilder that foretold the end of TV as we know it and the rise of "freedom" in the form of interactivity with screens with no cultural bureaucrats imposing degraded tastes on us. Let a thousand channels blossom!
Gilder is probably best known for helping foist supply-side economics on the U.S. during the Reagan era, but before his emergence as a pseudo-economist, he wrote several antifeminist texts, including Sexual Suicide and Men and Marriage, that insisted on the civilizing necessity of the heterosexual family to tame "naked nomad" males. His tech-futurist prophetic mode combines both those ideological agendas, with the same incoherence that characterized mainstream Republicanism from Reagan on. Gilder is eager to condemn pop culture for assaulting family values, yet he also takes a libertarian tack in celebrating the market for facilitating free choice and individuality.
So in Life After Television, aside from nationalistic diatribes against Japanese tech firms, he condemns the way profit-seeking media companies have fomented a race to the bottom in content production and celebrates the deregulated development and dissemination of technology as the key to sparking individualism, allowing people to raise themselves beyond the base instincts they share with other humans and which conventional mass media have had to cater to in order to secure mass audiences. "People have little in common," he writes, "except their prurient interests and morbid fears and anxieties" — oh, fallen humanity! "Necessarily aiming its fare at this lowest-common-denominator target, television gets worse and worse year after year."
But his critique of TV sounds the same as current critiques of YouTube, which is the shining manifestation of everything Gilder purported to believe would usher in a golden age of human flourishing. Brian Feldman argues in this New York piece that given YouTube's affordances, the Logan Paul video "feels less like an aberration than an inevitability." Offering people the apparent freedom to make, distribute, and watch whatever they want, in Gilder's view, would lead to inevitable self-improvement on a universal scale. The coming "rise of the teleputer" (which is not any dumber of a term than "smartphone," and certainly less biased) would turn high-speedconnectivity into the end of "totalitarian" TV culture. "The teleputer will reverse the effects of the television age. Rather than exalting mass culture, the teleputer will enhance individualism. Rather than cultivating passivity, the teleputer will promote creativity."
I suppose someone somewhere could make a case for the creativity and individualistic genius of Jake and Logan Paul. But it probably makes more sense to conclude that they signify how profitable mass media strategies have been replicated at the "microcelebrity" scale — though there is nothing particularly "micro" about the millions of views the Pauls garner for their oeuvre.
Or you might point to the way that YouTube is more "oppressive" and "totalitarian" a broadcaster than the old TV networks, in that its coercive apparatus recruits our complicity. We can't plead passivity; instead our interactive engagement is used to tune algorithms to feed us more content and to elicit more "engagement" (clicks) from us. Rather than allow us to escape from our "prurient interests and morbid fears," YouTube leverages them to an even greater degree and inculcates them, teaching kids (who have vast expanses of time to kill on their teleputers) to want the sort of content that scales.
Audiences still aggregate even in so-called peer-to-peer media, and no advertisers are eager to advertise against idiosyncrasy. Brands seek out other brands, which makes this AdWeek take on the Logan Paul scandal seem off-track. AdWeek suggests brands should be concerned about the "unsafe" nature of content made by popular YouTubers.
Brands and advertisers have been taking the issue of content safety more seriously over the past year, since ads were found running on inappropriate YouTube videos that celebrated extremism and racism.
"Content safety" here, of course, means safe for brands, not necessarily for society or for individual viewers. To calculate that kind of safety, brands must weigh backlash against high-profile notoriety, and the rate at which outrage collapses into tolerable familiarity. An unsafe brand will become safe again — the likes of Logan Paul (and Google) will be raking in ad money for videos more tasteless than the suicide forest clip in no time — literally, as they at no point stopped making money from such content. As Feldman points out,
Logan Paul is not the first person to post video of a dead body on YouTube, and he will not be the last (someone’s probably already done it since Saturday); his video simply operates in a tradition of crazy stunts and wild reactions that generate high engagement numbers on YouTube. Already, dozens of other prominent YouTubers are posting response videos, their own condemnations of Paul’s obviously terrible act, rushing to be the algorithmically determined next video in YouTube’s autoplay queue.
Logan Paul can build the "integrity" and value of his brand by temporarily alienating some advertisers (and most adults) while priming the readiness of other advertisers to buy in.
Having an "unsafe" brand is far more lucrative than having no brand, or no audience, which is the same thing in metricized media space. So the creative individuals may be able to publish their visionary work to all sorts of platforms, but the likelihood anyone will see it is far less. It was probably easier to convince a network executive to air your "challenging" show than it is to convince an algorithm to display it across social media and in search results. Luckily, you can redirect your creativity into appeasing algorithms, as this New York Times story details. You can make non sequitur videos that bring SEO logic to dramatic life, as James Bridle fretted about here.
Logan Paul's "apology" video was just more advertising for his already successful brand. It pulled off the clever twist of making scripted content seem more "extreme" and "emotionally raw" than his supposedly spontaneous stunts. When he says, "I want to apologize to the Internet," it feels like an ongoing corporate mission statement.
Of the many things Gilder gets wrong about the teleputing future, none has aged worse than this claim: "The force of microelectronics will blow apart all the monopolies, hierarchies, pyramids, and power grids of established industrial society. It will undermine all totalitarian regimes. Police states cannot endure under the advance of the computer because it increases the powers of the people far faster than the powers of surveillance."
Everything about that is backward. Networked computers have instigated the formation of monopolies, enhanced entrenched power, solidified existing hierarchies, provided a powerful tool for totalitarianism (which is advancing everywhere on Earth), and made ubiquitous surveillance a realistic possibility. It has turned the "power of the people" into a war of all against all as attention was turned into capital and communication made a form of competition. It didn't have to be that way, but the blinkered optimism of pundits like Gilder helped assure it would, fending off criticism and regulation of tech monopolies as they emerged and the systems of totalitarian control they helped build, as Zeynep Tufekci describes here. Now libertarian ideologues tout the economic benefits of monopoly.
Gilder's ruse was to beat ideological enemies over the head with his fundamental faith in the individual, a conviction that appears to have been broadly shared across Silicon Valley. This Ayn Rand–ian approach would have you believe that to stand in the way of unfettered capitalism is to stand in the way of individualism and to pave the road to serfdom and/or fascism. Strip the individual of the fetters supposedly imposed by mass media, and you automatically get vigorous creativity.
But the individual who is free to broadcast on a mass scale is not the inherent apogee of democracy; it may be that we are natural-born fascists when someone puts us on a platform. We don't automatically start espousing our unique inner truths but may instead voice corrosive bigotry that we hope will win us followers. As Katharine Cross argues at the Verge, the laissez-faire approach to content moderation on online platforms "creates a situation where women, people of color, queer, and disabled people all lack equal access to the service, laboring under the added burden of an angry mob scrutinizing their every move, even when they’re not 'famous' by any metric."
"Creativity" doesn't emerge from inside people, as if it is a buried essence. It comes from the contexts people share; it depends on and drives toward marshaling collective energy. Capitalism harnesses that collective energy in increasingly massified forms; dismantling one mass media opens territory for another one, it doesn't liberate economic demand for "narrowcasting" that can be made sustainably profitable for small-scale producers.
Capitalism tends toward social control at scale, just as fascism does. It benefits from a surface-level individualism — "express your true self through commodities!" — that corresponds to an underlying conformism: There is no other way to express yourself than through commodities, and no other freedoms can be protected. And it may be that people, adolescents especially, would rather consume the experience of other people having their individualism contained and disciplined rather than expressed. It may match their experience of social pressure. Alongside that spectacle of people having their uniqueness squashed is the spectacle of a few celebrity exceptions defying the rules, exemplars through whom viewers can vicariously experience the ability to transgress, to test limits, to fail upwards.
Logan Paul is the face of the sort of liberty Gilder espoused: a freedom of expression directed entirely toward commercial exploitation. Like his brother, who I wrote about here, he is a creature of the numbers. You are free to pursue more subscribers, and that's all the freedom you need. Such freedom coexists with the platforms that make it meaningful, that convert personal expression into alienated labor. Gilder wanted to define freedom as a matter of having the corporation-managed bandwidth through which to express oneself, but that just amounts to giving people a space where they can work for free for someone else. That's a strange way to define liberty, sort of like banning unions and calling it "the right to work."
The "bureaucratic" gatekeepers at old media companies were extremely problematic — they were incentivized to publish material that sustained existing prejudices and power structures, which had become powerful by being profitable. Gilder makes them into scapegoats, and preaches that once they are eliminated, the prejudices that they enforced would also disappear. But the prejudices are not rooted in outdated business models; they are rooted in business itself in a capitalist system. Systems of exploitation produce the culture that can help rationalize it. Right now, it looks like Logan Paul, but that hero has a thousand faces.