The early roundup with mothwrites
Links that feel like TikTok anxiety, patent anxiety, board game anxiety, we're all just a little anxious
I’m graduating today! Let’s do that old timey ritual that women and people of colour have only historically been able to do for a fraction of the time that universities have been in existence!
Nothing like some perspective to make you realise how weird a graduation ceremony is. Why do we sing the national anthem. Why is there latin.
The long read
1. The anxiety of influencers
I’m still not on TikTok, something which surprises me everyday given I have the attention span of a six-year old and a love of stupid and well performed jokes. I think this article did a good job of keeping me off it for another year at least. It’s brilliantly written English-but-Anthropology which looks at the life of several young men who live together in an Influencer House, where they make TikToks as their job and try to get rich. I originally wrote famous here, but fame doesn’t mean rich in our world and hasn’t for a long time.
Beyond using TikTok as a moneymaking platform, all the guys seemed to regard the app as a social and political godsend. Again and again throughout the weekend, they rhapsodize about TikTok as though it were a conduit for sustained grassroots movements. “When I was younger,” Brandon, who is nineteen, says, “I didn’t have this much perspective on the world. I didn’t get to see everyone’s opinions on things. What was it? Just the news? Facebook? As a kid, I didn’t have a TikTok. I wasn’t an eight-year-old kid with a TikTok seeing what everyone else is seeing. Now everyone feels like they have a voice, and I think that’s what people are afraid of.”
“Wait,” I say. “Who do you think is afraid?”
“The government,” Brandon says.
“You think the government is scared?” I ask.
“Yeah, because on TikTok we have voices,” Brandon says. “We’re a whole nation of voices. That shit’s scary.”
Not to sound like an English professor or anything, but as a professor of English, I can’t help thinking of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin suggests that fascistic governments aim to maintain the status quo by providing citizens with the means to express themselves aesthetically without reforming their lives materially. Thus the aforementioned government that Brandon thinks TikTokers have scared shitless actually, as Benjamin writes, “sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses—but on no account granting them rights.” More to the point, any countercultural voltage these influencers purport to possess gets nullified by the fact that they have clear incentives not to talk about controversial matters, lest they get dropped by their brands. “I don’t talk about politics at all,” Brandon says. “It’s like there’s always another opinion. It’s always better to be neutral. I feel like everybody avoids politics on social media. Besides that, though, everyone feels like they have a voice.”
That this is a chilling contradiction to the claim that TikTok is a platform for authenticity seems obvious. But I think the issue here is even more mysterious and complex. After all, these kids were very young when their parents gave them iPhones and tablets—they’ve never known a self that wasn’t subject to anonymous virtual observation. And so it may well be that whatever we mean by “authentic” here isn’t the standard definition that Rousseau and the Romantics first fathomed—a true effusion of your unvarnished personality—but is “authentic” in the sense that their identities have been made in perfect, unconscious sympathy with whatever their mob of online followers has deemed agreeable and inoffensive.
So the truth is that the influencer economy is just a garish accentuation of the economy writ large. As our culture continues to conflate the private and public realms—as the pandemic has transformed our homes into offices and our bedrooms into backdrops, as public institutions increasingly fall prey to the mandates of the market—we’ve become cheerfully indentured to the idea that our worth as individuals isn’t our personal integrity or sense of virtue, but our ability to advertise our relevance on the platforms of multinational tech corporations.
That the view of personhood produced by the economy of influence is the same brass-tacks thinking that has infiltrated the university might be the single greatest repudiation of the pixelated world that we’re now asking them to inhabit. Whether they’re ordinary undergrads or social-media celebs, they all strike me as unbearably sad, and it’s a sadness that seems more than casually related to the ways in which we’ve defined what it means to be a person.
A quick break
A medium read
3. Patently harmful
This is an important read but I found the wording quite difficult. For me, it was a good synthesis of different issues with patents for the Covid vaccine, it could’ve gone further, but interesting nonetheless.
This is one of those articles that I kinda like but I kinda hate. I only put it here because I’m like, yes, people should know this and some people don’t know this, but it is written in a way that is the reason that people don’t know this. Anyway.
The main thing this article hits on is that patents are given to pharma companies in order to “encourage innovation”. You have to protect vaccine IP because if they don’t have control over something they can’t make money off it, and if you can’t make money off something, what’s the point of doing it?????,,,,,
The issues with this framing are numerous
only things that make money get funded (why we have several drugs for erectile disfunction and few to help period cramps)
companies can exploit poor countries that actively need vaccines but can’t afford them
IP can extend to FOOD and Lays (the chips) can do things like sue Indian farmers for using their potato recipe.
companies are less likely to do anything for the public good if it comes at an opportunity cost
most pharma companies are using government funded research that taxes pay for in the first place, so they’re not losing anything but potential profit when they can’t patent something
A quick break
A medium quick read
5. Slow death of the crowdfunded board game
I’ve written a bit about crowdfunding techniques elsewhere, which are becoming more and more interesting to me because they were a big thing for a long time and then companies started monetising them in a different way. Now, crowdfunding holds neither the social nor financial benefit that it used to, maybe because companies have figured out the game, or maybe because crowdfunders have figured out the game. I’m not sure who broke the game, but it’s not fun anymore: Opinion: Crowdfunding is killing board game expansions
While crowdfunding is a wonderful resource for board game development, it’s also become quite the poisonous instrument to the industry. It has influenced every single publisher in one way or another. The slow death of the traditional board game expansion is perhaps its biggest crime, and one which will continue to affect the way we purchase and consume board game releases for the foreseeable future.