Independent Publisher ✱ Minor Theoretical Literature ✱ Berlin/Nicosia
Transcription: Becoming the Product (2025) Book Presentation by Morgane Billuart
Becoming the Product was published by Set Margins’ in May 2025. This book presentation and discussion between Morgane Billuart and Helena McFadzean took place on June 16th 2025 at Pro QM, Berlin. It was recorded and edited by Polymnia Tsinti.
Katja Reichard:
Welcome to the presentation of Becoming the Product: The Critical Internet Researcher as a Virtual Intellectual So we have Morgane Billuart here, the author, and Helena McFadzean for the discussion. So Morgane is a French writer and visual artist. She graduated from Gerrit Rietveld in Amsterdam and studied at Cooper Union in New York and is an affiliated researcher of the Institute of Network Cultures. She published her book Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed. This is the last book on the realm of female health technologies. She also studied in the MA of Transdisciplinary Strategies in Vienna, and has exhibited widely and written in books and magazines.
And Helena is a writer, editor and curator and also collaborated in the making of the book. And she also curated and worked on the artist research project “Aerobic Topologies”, which sounds really interesting too. And you also do podcasts sometimes, and also the book seems to be a podcast, right?
Morgane Billuart:
Yeah, I will explain it.
Katja Reichard:
Yeah, okay, you will explain it. So yeah, I'm curious as a boomer to hear about this thing, and what is it about? So, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. So the words to you, and yes, Set Margins, really great publisher.
Morgane Billuart:
Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for coming. Nice constellation of many people that I know from very different places. So that's great. And thanks for the ones who came from Miss Read also because we tried to spread the word. Today I will be presenting this small book, which is as you just introduced entitled Becoming the Product: The Critical Internet Researcher as a Virtual Intellectual. Just for the ones who perhaps don't know me, I will just quickly introduce myself. So, there was a brief introduction, but in general, my practice focuses on the critical assessment of social and economical implications of technology. I’m currently shifting my practice a little bit into something else, which is more hardware related, but that will be for future projects. If you are interested, at some point I can share some things. I am mostly doing book writing, also a little bit of short films, and I have a podcast practice which I will relate to the book later. And these are just some extracts from films and visual stuff that I've also been working on. So coming back to the book, we're going to start with the figure of Joshua Citarella.
To introduce this person, for the ones who don't know, he's an internet critic and actually, right now I think really much more focusing on, let's say, politics, specifically in the United States. But the reason why I want to mention him is because in 2020, I think, I didn't know about him, but a friend of mine shared a post online that [Joshua] shared on Instagram, where he said that he was going to quit his teaching position in an Art University to become a full time online content creator. And he already had back then, I think, quite a big online audience, mostly on Discord, Instagram and also Patreon.
And the reason why this got my interest is because as I was myself doing Critical Internet Research, which I will define in a moment, I was thinking and observing all this sort of trend that was exploding online that was not specific only to Joshua Citarella but of people who were studying Digital Culture and Critical Internet Research, and were mostly producing and showcasing their content online and not within an institutional setting. It's not a clear boundary that I want to operate with today, but it's just that it was something that I was observing and I was really interested in. And I just want to mention his quote from a very long Instagram story where he was explaining why he didn't want to do that anymore, mostly because he didn't believe in the institutional, let's say, structure and funding system, specifically in the United States, but he just briefly formulated: “This September I'm not going back to teaching. I've spent the past few years arguing against the idea that online platforms could be a suitable replacement for institutions, but now I'm leaving my university jobs to become a content creator.” I think this is something very specific to him, he was already famous and let's say sustainable enough to do that. I do not recommend it and I also cannot do that myself. If you have a job, keep your job, okay? The economy is terrible, as we all know. But he could do it, luckily.
And so I was just starting to reflect a little bit on all of these things. I was mostly also myself, let's say, researching and listening to a lot of online content creators that were doing internet analysis or just like digital culture criticism. We can mention Joshua Citarella who was doing it in a specific way, but I just want to also mention Internet Analysis, which is also a very big, let's say, YouTube influencer that also does that and who also studied Media Theory in the first place, but became really big on YouTube. You also have Kidology who does a lot of sort of social commentary on internet cultures. So I was just observing all these people who studied Humanities and were looking into internet culture and like different kinds of trends. And I was very interested in, well, not only their emergence, but also just the fact that they had such a big audience online, that seems to best benefit their discourse and also the commentary around the discourse, creating an interesting feedback loop for their practice.
So the questions that I was mostly concerned with when I started to think about this, but more so specifically thinking about this book, were: Is there an existing lineage of critical internet research? How do artists and researchers in digital and internet culture monetize and render their work visible? So that was like the broad scheme/question that I started to work with. And I just want to quickly say that it was also a personal quest and question for me, because three years ago I started a podcast, which I called Becoming the Product, not really sure why, but I was like, this is a good name. Because I was really thinking about how to best present research online, and I didn't know how I was going to do it. I also made this weird logo on Cinema 4D back in the day, which is not representative of anything that is a product. And for three years I was posting monthly episodes that were related to digital culture and media theory. I will just name a few of these podcast’s episodes, so you can have an idea of what the topics implemented were. So for example, The Digital Mundane: Risk and Potential. Love is Blind, Dualism and Mind Enhancement. Machine Learning and Meme-Making. Artificiality and Emotions: Beyond the Flesh.
So I was a little bit psycho back in the day because I was always like, oh, once per month, I'm going to start researching a topic that I like, I'm going to research a lot and read, and at the end of each month I'm just going to produce a podcast where I record my voice and put the bibliography there. And I was doing that because mostly I started to realize that whatever I was doing at school, mostly art school, I just couldn't manage to have interesting conversations with most of my teachers, I couldn't really manage to have a lot of feedback, and I realized that most of the people that were doing similar things as me were actually quite present online/sharing online and started getting visibility online, commentary, etc. So I was thinking, okay, I'm just going to start doing that myself, and this is why I called this Becoming the Product back in the day.
So coming back to the book, when I had to do my master's thesis, I was reflecting on these topics a lot, and I was thinking about wanting to do something about the podcast, and then I started to think, okay, why not try to bridge all of these together and reflect on the production of critical internet research nowadays? So I just want to quickly introduce a little bit of what's in the book, and then I will go a little bit more into the details, but of course the first thing I had to do was to look into what internet studies is, right? And I have a small first chapter on the ever changing stages of internet studies. And in that chapter I try to understand a little bit like how it came to be, let's say, established outside of institutions, but also in institutions, because with the emergence of the internet, of course, you had a lot of people who started to like, think about how Media Theory could take on these Internet Studies topics. But of course, this discipline being very young, it was very difficult for universities and also institutions to acknowledge as relevant and as, let's say, justifiable for funding and stuff such as history, art history or philosophy and whatnot.
And quite quickly on, I decided to look into, let’s say, two key figures for the [first chapter] “Ever-Changing Status of Internet Studies”, which were Geert Lovink and Joshua Citarella, because I think they are two relevant figures when it comes to that topic. First, Geert Lovink because, for those who don’t know about him, he is quite a key figure of early net criticism, and he's one of the figures that also founded Media Studies departments in some universities. So when no one believed that studying the internet was relevant, he was arguing for it, and he was constantly just trying to build an argument for that. And he was doing it when no one was doing it. He was doing it when no one wanted to believe in it. So he's like a key figure for that. And so looking into him as a lineage of critical internet researchers was very relevant. And then I also looked into Joshua Citarella, not as a lineage of Geert Lovink, but as a more recent formation of that as someone who is also an internet critic, but has a very different model revenue and visibility system.
And then in the second chapter I looked a little bit into “The Ideal of the Self-Organized Critical Internet Researcher”, because once we acknowledge that this might be a new, interesting model, we have to look, of course, into how it's, you know, to some extent, an interesting ideology, but it's very individuality driven, remains on a lot of precarious kind of practices because you are always outside of the scope of institutional support, but at the same time, you can also trace it back to the history of patronage in general, which, you know, for the long history, of art and critical thinking was often funded by philanthropists and maecenas. So the argument I'm trying to make in the book is that, well, being a self-employed critical thinker is maybe not that different to what existed back in the day, but it's just that you have micropayments from people instead of having one key figure of an extremely wealthy person that funds you. Now that we exist in this metaphor of becoming the product, which means doing critical internet research on the internet, that's when the metaphor of the idea of becoming the product comes along. So what does it mean to do theory with influencer stylings? Because when you produce theory online, you cannot make it as boring as an academic paper because, you know, that's the thing you're trying not to do, basically.
So I talk a little bit about this idea of influencer styling of theory and also some kind of criticism of like what does it mean to produce research at the pace of the attention economy? Because if there's one thing that's actually quite good, let's say about academia and institutions is that the funding and the time available makes it possible for people to research things for years and not make quick statements. But at the same time, you could say that academia will never be fast enough for technological critique, because the moment that, you know, a new problematic platform comes, the research paper about it comes like five years later or something. So I'm kind of trying to discuss the question of the timeline on those wonders because you want to be able to do internet critique rapidly, but you don't want to do it to a point where the necessity for constant content production diminishes the quality of the work. So [in one of the next chapters] “Virtual Intellectual and the Process of Online Becoming. I talk about the concept of becoming the product and also, which I will describe a little bit later, the idea of the theory girl, because Joshua and Geert are both white males, and there's actually a lot of other people that are doing internet criticism online that use the, let's say, online performativity of being a girl online, which is also a sort of strategical tool to catch attention, to be able to deliver theory, and I will go back to it in a little bit.
And in the end, I had the opportunity and luck to be able to interview Geert and Joshua, and two women Alex Quicho and Sophie Publig on the question matter because I was thinking it would be nice to also get their opinion on the entire subject matter, know about their strategy etc. If you want to know more you should get the book. Okay, so as I said, Geert Lovink for those who don't know about him, he's an interesting figure, also somewhat quite controversial in his methodologies. But that's the thing, right? He’s not purely, let's say, conservative in his methodologies and in his arguments, so he also got a lot of attention for that, but has also been criticized in the academic world for that exact same matter.
But the question is always: Do you want to be academically and methodologically consistent, or do you want to engage critically with the world and get the feedback that you need to be able to bring awareness about internet critique and technological development? I brought [Geert in] and analyzed a little bit this research institute that he founded, which is called the Institute of Network Cultures, as an example of what does it look like when you produce critical internet research online? So the Institute of Network Cultures has been organizing book launches, book production, conferences etc. throughout the years, for the last 20 years, and has been able, thanks to the support of the [Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences] in which it finds itself, to fund this critical research project. And, it's going to close in a year and a half, unfortunately, so it's going to be also very interesting to know what's going to happen to the future of that institution once it's, let's say, deinstitutionalized, although it was always a little bit on the border of being a marginal space. You also have a lot of Institute of Network Cultures (INC) productions here in case you're interested, just on this corner.
Joshua Citarella, as I said, is an artist and writer, who coined himself as an internet critic, and we also discussed this in an interview: What does internet critic mean exactly? It's this kind of loose terminology that is not specifically self-explanatory, but it's about social and critical commentary of the internet. [Joshua] has initiated and runs the platform Do Not Research, which is a very different kind of model, but has a similar, to me, line of inspiration as the Institute of Network Cultures. It posts blogs and sometimes produces books based on those articles that are submitted and sent, and has its own kind of revenue model based on subscriptions, Patreons as well, and also people who pay for the books when they are out.
So of course, as I said, we can talk a lot about those two people, but it would be also undermining the fact that, there's a lot of other people that are doing this and that interestingly enough, the concept of being a Girl Online and doing internet research is very relevant and still also dangerous sometimes, and I will explain why. To do that and to research that I looked into Sophie Publig, who is a digital culture and internet teacher at the Angewandte, who focuses a lot of her practice now on occultism, but also a lot on like the concept of the Girl Online and how the Girl Online can be a strategy to deliver discourses. There's a sort of performativity and maybe naivety on the surface that comes with it into the way you present yourself, dress up etc. but it's actually just some kind of subversion to be able to deliver the theory that you actually want to implement.
The other researcher that is also a key figure in that, let's say, performativity and is also interviewed in the book is Alex Quicho, who is also a writer and a critical theorist and who has recently written a small book that was published with Aksioma, that is called Girl Intelligence, and she's really deconstructing this idea of the Girlstack, if I'm correct, understanding the scope of the Girl Online and how she's being perceived can be like a weapon also to some extent. So once again, some of the things that I just mentioned in terms of talking about the platform, either Institute of Network Cultures or Do Not Research, are mentioned in the interviews. And also this performativity and tool of the Girl Online is discussed with these two women in the last interview.
I just want to mention that this book was written in the scope and in the lineage of, you know, all these people that I've mentioned and I want to take the opportunity to mention some books that are really interesting/important, I think, to understand the bigger question: Dark Fiber by Geert Lovink, which is the publication of his PhD, basically, I think in 2002. Digital Method by Richard Rogers, which is also an interesting book. I don't know if you know about it, but it's about trying to understand how you can use or create new methodologies for studying the internet in academia, which is a very discussable thing, but it’s an interesting read.
And Art Worlds by Howard S. Becker, which is also a very relevant book for understanding the history of patronage and maecenas. It explains that it's a very recent idea to have state funded art and that for the history of the art practices the funding most of the time had to be private. So it gives a little bit of perspective on how to best organize and rethink how we can fund critical thinking and art nowadays.
And finally Digital Plenitude by Jay David Bolter, which is also very interesting because it talks about this sort of flattening of knowledge making in the age of digital practices, which enabled the rise of, let's say, critical culture in a more democratic way than it used to exist, right? Because often or before academia used to be this reserved thing and now new media has enabled this discourse to come to the hands of way more people and more democratically.
And, now, I wrote a Q & A with Helena. Helena... Well, she can introduce herself best, but also has feet into both worlds and is implementing that in projects that also deal with para-academia and digital culture and edited the book. So I was thinking it would be a great opportunity to discuss some of those things with her. And, I don't know if we start with this or if anyone has any comments, but we can also do the Q&A or whatever commentary you have.
Anon:
I was just curious... Your question about what does it mean to do theory with influencer stylings is really interesting, but I was wondering how, in your thinking, do the affordances or the sort of shapes of different platforms also affect that, like TikTok versus X, Bluesky or Mastodon; they all have very different styles as platforms.
Morgane Billuart:
Yeah, I think if you do a YouTube video critical essay, you can take the time to expand, etc. If you do, a TikTok video of course has to be more and more catchy and stuff. I think it’s really interesting to see the different strategies that exist, but I'm afraid that sometimes, specifically on TikTok, the shorter the format the more kind of clickbaity it has to be. And sometimes I like to think that... I was thinking about this the same... I was thinking each episode of the podcast is like 30 minutes, how would I put it on TikTok? I was like, what's the catch up line? And I just couldn't find an answer for myself. So I think sometimes you also get really limited by the scope. But at the same time, I think that it is way more challenging and interesting to think about how to bring people into critical thinking on TikTok than through video essays, because video essays on YouTube are basically what you could do easily etc. I can only think of TikTok and YouTube right now. I don't know much about the Threads. Twitter, I think, is not really a good place for elaborating.
What is interesting with TikTok, for example, is that TikTok is really limiting for sending you to another point, right? You can only get an extra link to somewhere if you're affiliated or something. So it seems like they really want to cut short the possibility of going somewhere else. But I would say that, it takes a really big amount of skillset and knowledge and intelligence to be able to do critical thinking on TikTok, because to get a point [across] in that format and to actually induce people to go see something else. Yeah, I wish I knew how to do that, but I don't.
Helena McFadzean:
And I do think that's a point I kind of want to build on a little bit, because you were also a guest on a podcast that I'm like co-hosting called Disintegrator, I’m not sure, maybe 1 or 2 people in this audience have listened to it before. Morgane came on as a guest, and we also had this conversation about these topics. And you said this really nice thing that I really appreciated. We were talking about the speed and like acceleration of producing research online as a critical internet researcher as this figure or as people who are para-academic and showcasing their work on different platforms with different speed requirements, I would say or like frames, and you said something that I thought was really nice, which was like, just because it's possible, it doesn't mean that it's wishable. And yeah, that was really nice because, yes, a lot of these things are happening more online but it's also still a question: Where does one want to present one's research and why? So I guess that's how I would respond to that question in a very like workaround way.
Anon:
It would probably be interesting to hear both of your opinions on... Because you said you were going to speak more about the methodology, did I miss it?
Morgane Billuart:
The methodology in the book or?
Anon:
Yes in the book or of internet research in general.
Morgane Billuart:
Well, that’s the interesting thing. If you look into the practices of Geert Lovink and Joshua Citarella, they would actually say that the methodology is quite experimental. Let's say you want to write about a new trend on the internet, right? Some people would argue that you need to bring it back to some concrete hardcore theory and make it a little bit more, let's say, related to that topic, to make sense of it, let's say, but for example, Geert and Joshua both argue that you need to use new canons, because actually, apparently in their own ideology, the canon that academia was being built on does not relate to the world anymore, and like the references that we are now inheriting from are maybe not so helpful. I don't know if I fully agree with that. I think it's good to know a bit the lineage of thinkers before you and not just be like, oh, I saw this on TikTok, you know, because that's the danger and that's also the main criticism.
In the book, I do not talk about methodology but I do talk about the critique of critical internet research, because there's many things that to some extent, if you look at it from a scientific or quantitative, whatever perspective, are not extremely accurate. But the counterargument I would make to that is that, and that's a question we can also ask to everyone: Do you want to make a critique that is like so specifically scientifically proven, or do you want to bring a certain sense of awareness on a topic that you think is urgent to shed light on? For example, I [first] saw TikTok and YouTube answering way faster to some topics that were technologically, let's say, complex or socially complex, [and] then I saw papers and scientific people speaking about [them].
One example, which is not really harmful, but for example the trad wife concept, of this new ideology of being at home and like having a provider man and stuff. It would take so much time to do a proper sociological study into this, which I think needs to be done, but if you want to bring awareness for all the young people that are looking at TikTok, perhaps it's good to deconstruct it on the go and then the methodology is a bit porous, but it's just a different kind of knowledge making and it's a different kind of scope, I would say, because will this young girl who is like 12 to 13, read an academic paper about tradwives? I don't know. So I think it's about admitting that different kinds of institutions and practices have to research, but I think it's good to be a bit experimental and a bit, I wouldn't say fast, but like reactive, more than thinking too much about the methodologies, that's my own take on it.
Helena McFadzean:
But I think also what's interesting is that there are new methodologies emerging by the fact that research has places online now that are also shaped by research interest, shaped by platform dynamics, but also sometimes by factors that are really also favoring that type of research. And Morgane is writing about the critical internet researcher... These are often also people that are theorizing about the internet and media, and things that are happening at a pace that don't really have a place in traditional academia. That's on platforms and speed.
Morgane Billuart:
But that being said, I want to mention, just to acknowledge, that all the people mentioned in this book and also us have educational/academic background. So it just goes to say that even if we don't want to acknowledge it, we have inherited from some methodologies. I think it would be wrong to say that we are just super experimental.
Anon:
I wanted to ask what's the general trend among this para-academic bubble? Have they developed a methodology to live up to like this institutionalized scientific approach? Or are they trying to preserve this bubble with their own kind of rules? You already told us what’s your opinion but I'm interested in what's the general debate? Because, like you said, some of these porous theories have no methodology set in concrete. It's been also criticized and there's been debate about it. So I'm curious to know, in what direction is the whole thing developing. Is it trying to be more scientific to imitate some of this institutional research or is it trying to stay more independent of it?
Helena McFadzean:
There are certain practices of research that don't have a place in traditional academia because of the requirements and the responsiveness, and the kind of very contemporary nature of what is being researched, especially when it comes to network cultures and, you know, these types of things. I think it's interesting that, you know, in these, I think theory bubbles, let's say, maybe also there is more of an interest in kind of changing how research is done generally because it’s critical research. I don't have any concrete examples because I'm not a scientist, I'm from a Humanities background and so, I wouldn't know what that would kind of materialize as for people that are doing more kind of para-academic, let's say, science or like natural science research. That’s my workaround answer to that, that I can't give you a definite answer of the general trend because I think it really depends on, like, what interest people are trying to fulfill with research and what kind of remnants of the traditional academia they still hold within them as well.
But there are loads of different examples of different models that exist. And Morgane kind of gets into it in the book as well... People that follow a kind of researcher-influencer model where it's kind of very independent and kind of not, connected to these I guess mediating structures or however you want to call it. And then there are also more like para-academic entities that see themselves also as this thing that's outside of the individual. So I guess those would all operate differently as well.
Morgane Billuart:
Yeah, to add to that maybe, I think this is something that is very specific to this discipline, but you don't see it so much, for example, in things like mathematics or like history. I think that's the entire conversation. Because it's a new discipline, because it's a discipline that borrows from other disciplines, you have this entire conversation around it in ways that other disciplines do not feel affected because they're so hegemonic, and the methodologies are so rigorous that there's no room for conversation Because the influencer model is perhaps relevant to some corporations, museums and stuff, sometimes the institutions are actually curious about the methodologies of those individuals.
So, for example, Joshua, in the interview, he says no, but I still believe that whatever expertise he's building e.g. building his audience, having this feedback, collecting these things and stuff are very relevant for, you know, museums, corporations, think tanks and stuff. So he's creating a different kind of knowledge that might be useful, but it doesn't say so much about, let’s say, questioning his methodologies and stuff. It's like a new sort of field of knowledge that can be applied to other things. But I would definitely say that, in this conversation, I haven't seen it happen in, let's say, a more historically approved field of disciplines.
Helena McFadzean:
I think it really kind of belongs to this transdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary or even network culture based... Basically, I think these methodologies are attractive to people who are interested in, from the beginning, doing the kind of research that might not have a home in institutions where that's just stifled.
Anon:
I was wondering, and maybe it's also adding to the question... Is the idea of peer review applicable at all, or what kind of form could that take in this new network culture?
Morgane Billuart:
There is for the Institute of Network Cultures and Do Not Research a group of people who read [the submissions] and comment. And I don't think they would publish... Not everything can be published, but it's definitely not as rigorous. But what I think is interesting, and I think Becoming Press can also talk about it, is this idea of, yeah, peer review network of people who are knowledgeable in that field and who review each other's texts. I don't know, I think that's also a strategy, right?
Palais Sinclaire:
I mean, if you don't mind me interjecting, I can say like what was being discussed earlier reminds me of a conversation I had with someone that I mentioned to you a few days ago, this Louis Morelle, who really believed that, yes, there's a difference in methodology when you don't have the chance to do as much research or do as much peer reviewing as you would in an academic context, but there's really something important and special about what you mentioned with acceleration and velocity, that there is a new stage that is becoming very relevant, that academia may have not predicted, which creates a kind of split. You will end up with one stage that operates extremely fast, and a philosopher or an interesting person, or a commenter or something that can respond to something so fast that it is incredible and it's impressive. And this is going to become important to find the meeting point between the two possibilities of rigor and velocity. Because the two have a lot of value, and the fact that you can actually reach so many people with a story and so fast and so off the top of your head, that actually the story format, it may have seemed like a kind of banal part of social media for a long time, going back to like Snapchat in the UK 15, 20 years ago, let's say... The idea of the story and the value and the potential it has is kind of changing the game a little bit. And I think there's going to need to be a point where we strategize, and maybe other people are already in this process of strategizing what we can do, where you take advantage of the velocity of the Instagram Story and then you have the traditional methods that would then follow these kinds of things. So what is the meeting point? I don't know. Because yes, I mean, also peer reviewing is the kind of thing that can take different amounts of time depending on what rigor you're looking for. So you can do kind of ten year peer reviews, or you can do a one year peer review. And I think that we're going to end up with this kind of scale... This new version of academia is going to be both institutionalized, non institutionalized, but it's also going to be operating on many different scales, and it's probably going to follow a kind of capitalistic fragmentation model where everybody starts inserting themselves at a different speed and in a different rigor. And then there's going to be a kind of broad network of different kinds of levels and different kinds of speed. So you'll be following your Instagram stories, for one thing, and then you might follow up with it somewhere else. So I think you can find a balance, but I think this is going to become really important. It's difficult to say what's going to happen in the future because it's being figured out now. Stories as a technology have only been working as well as they do for a relatively short amount of time. I mean, Stories only existed for the length of a single peer review. So I think that that's what's going to be interesting for us as publishers and writers and researchers. How can we use both? And then how can we fuse both? And how can we then find what is the possibility after? Because if you can have rigor and velocity then it's a different game.
Helena McFadzean:
And I think also what's really interesting is that this kind of disruptive practices, let's say, are seeping into the requirements of academia. There are all these increased demands of like also, you know, what kind of attention do you bring to your institution? It's all about the attention economy, really, this conversation I would say. And how to manage it and how it's seeping into a lot of different knowledge making practices and how they make themselves visible. We have this very cute catalog of possible questions, and I'm going to bring this one out now because I think it's very relevant and important, to ask the question of is it even possible, and I'm going to direct this to Morgane, do you think it's possible still now as like someone who is producing knowledge academically or para-academically to even, like, opt out of these platform dynamics?
Morgane Billuart:
Sometimes I'm considering it because, for example, I have this podcast and I have a Substack and blah, blah, blah, and I have so many things, but they are not generating any money. And sometimes I'm like... Pfff... Should I just stop? But then I'm like, if I stop, who's going to read my work? Should I just completely change the topic even? Because that's the thing, I think when you produce this kind of specific research, you want some kind of conversation around it, hopefully. And I'm thinking if I don't publish online, if I don't do this, if I don't do that, I just feel like I'm just going to be doing it for myself, which is great, but I seek to, you know, have these kinds of moments in my life, so... I don't know. I don't know if I can opt out, really. I think it's... That's the thing... You're used to being kind of like just a little bit on the margins of other disciplines, so you take that habit and then you never really get comforted by academia or institutions, because what you're doing is always a little bit not... It doesn't really fit a specific funding. It doesn't really speak of a specific kind of branch of whatever application. So you get used to this idea and then before you even know it, you're even more marginalized. Yes, so I don't know if one can opt out.
This question of deplatformization is a question even for example Joshua because... Well, there used to be a time when we thought, you know, governments are going to back us up anyway, but, I don't know if that's true anymore. So, you know, if you're being left out here and there. Well, yeah. True. The platform could also disappear or kick you out or shadow ban you but it feels like a lot of terms are a little bit porous right now. So I think that's also why people are playing on different fields. And that's also something that I want to mention. I think a lot of people that I talked with and even myself, and also, you know, that from your work experience, if I'm correct, it's never that black and white. It's not like people are doing critical internet research and have nothing to do with the academic world, [or that] people are in academia and have nothing to do with the corporate world. I mean, you see this kind of weird mix that is happening currently right now, like academics who are working for think tanks and influencers that are working for consulting in museums. It becomes this strange weaving of knowledge exchange, which I suppose is quite good? But at the same time, it makes everyone a little bit more precarious, I have the feeling because it's just this kind of like, yeah, snippets of exchange, but no one is really truly supporting anything like, concretely, you know. Unless when you're an individual and you're trying to like, monetize your own practice and you're trying to support yourself. But I would say, and that's my own personal take, I think it's also just, very healthy to, work a little bit in those different areas. I have never worked in academia, but I can just feel, and I’m happy to hear if anyone works in academia, that a lot of people are also fed up with their own system there. Bureaucracy, methodologies... So I think everyone is happy to actually trade a little bit of time and expertise in other fields, it seems, because once you're stuck in one bubble, anyway, it just seems like it's not good for your mental health.
Helena McFadzean:
There is a really nicely phrased question. I'm also just going to actually read it out because it's so well phrased, that I think fits really well here.
And it says: As traditional institutions face increasing budget cuts, what do we think happens to the legitimacy of critical thinking? Can it survive without institutional support? And are universities our only options? I guess we kind of answered it already but, or we kind of touched on it, but this idea that the institution sometimes doesn’t really provide the kind of feedback that we are looking for. Yeah, what kind of hopes do we maybe still have for them?
Morgane Billuart:
Yeah... Oh, maybe you want to say something...
Anon:
No, no please...
Morgane Billuart:
No, no but if you have something to say...
Anon:
Yeah... The idea of the Dark Forest came into my mind, and maybe someone knows more than me right now about it, and I have just a very vivid memory of what it tells by Busta and Lil Internet and what they're introducing is that there is a new type of audience emerging and platforms, meaning that... I had a feeling that we're speaking from the perspective of the content creators, but we also have to acknowledge the fact that the audiences themselves are also very much shifting, and also the type of focus and attention economy [are also created as a result of that]. If we have different types of knowledge levels, meaning that we have for instance, the meme of the Tradwife, which was mentioned earlier, which can consume anyone basically because it's very, very accessible. But at one point, it's also interesting for people to access certain types of knowledge, which is more hidden, secret knowledge, as it’s always interesting, and it's always going to be in trend. And that type of knowledge is not always accessible and... It may also be interesting to consider how to create platforms... How to invent that type of, or let's say, that perspective on the audience and the type of knowledge?
Morgane Billuart:
Yeah, I mentioned the Dark Forest a little bit in the book, but I haven't dived too much into it. But I think it's true to say that this audience, and I will speak here about it because in the Dark Forest they mention a lot this kind of thing that happened throughout Discord and stuff, it creates almost its own, let's say, semiotics and visual language that becomes a genre in itself, that I think is fascinating, but I haven't worked with too much, just because I would think that a study of that would need to benefit from a specific object of study, like of an image or something, which Joshua Citarella did a lot, for example, by looking at specific kind of memes and stuff. But, yeah, the question of the audience, I haven't looked too much into it in the book. Because my assumption is somehow that the people who are interested in this topic find those, let's say, content creators/influencers, and then what is really interesting though in that context is that then this is a kind of a network building around the audience that actually benefits all of these people. So it creates its own network based on finding those key figures.
And I can say that for Geert Lovink, for example. By creating the Institute of Network Cultures, there is this entire range of affiliated researchers that are like working together and producing together. And the same for Do Not Research, where a lot of people are collaborating. And I think this is also the very beautiful thing about these models is that, as you say, not only the audience is specific, but the audience is so specific in its niche that they also find collaborators and ways to expand on their practices. I’m not sure if that answers exactly your question, but I did not look too much into the audience, because to be honest with you, if we speak about Joshua Citarella, for example, the audience is so broad, it goes from like the troll to the incel and there's me in between, you know... A lot of different people are interested in this kind of research. A lot of people are studying a lot of different research questions in that kind of research. So I would say that it's very difficult to say who the audience is, but what I can say for sure is that the audience seems happy enough to collaborate and to produce new forms of knowledge together.
Helena McFadzean:
But can I ask you, when you were formulating this question... Did I understand this correctly, that you were also getting a bit into this thing that like the consumers are the creators as well type of thing, where everyone kind of has skin in the game? That's not really the Dark Forest thing, but you were kind of talking about the change in audience, maybe how attention is as a marketable thing that may be changing?
Anon:
It touches also, of course, on that topic that we're not seeing the audience just as a great default mass, but the audience itself can be proactive depending on what their interest is and how they want to relate to the content. So I think that it may be also interesting, to shed light into this dark forest of the users, to see... what possibilities and emancipatory tools do they have in order to co-create content, and not just be consumers. And again, attention economy, which is sucking out our focus and so on and so forth.
Morgane Billuart:
But just to add to this, for example, there's an interesting moment when we talk with Joshua about it where he says that, for example, on Do Not Research there's a very specific kind of article that works better than others. Apparently the more experimental one, the more deconstructive one, and stuff like this, [work better]. And so I think, as a matter of fact, if you think about Do Not Research as an institution, because it wants to have more views and more engagement, they're going to benefit this kind of research more and more. So as the platform grows and as the people who are reading this want less and less, let's say, methodologically rigorous text, like they're going to promote even more of those things. And this is what you're going to see more and more. So it's just a kind of reinforcement of its own genre or something like this. It was actually quite crazy but he was literally saying that... I don't want to quote his words badly, but there was something along the lines of that apparently the people that engage with Do Not Research are really not interested in traditional academia, media theory. The texts that bring those references heavily and methodologically are the ones that perform the worst, unless they're very well constructed, but he just said, we need new canons.
Anon:
I have a background in Media Theory and Geert Lovink was a big influence on me when I started as a teenager, but something that I really notice now is that primary sources are not as crucial, and getting the story is what most people want. That’s one of the biggest differences I see between me and somebody who is getting a Bachelor's right now. My professors were grilling into me, go to the root, go to the root, and now people want the story on someone else's take on it, not because they're intellectually lazy, that happens also, but there's definitely a huge shift in that. I think that’s one of the biggest things I see... The idea of what the primary sources are in Media Theory, obviously, you get a lot into philosophy, and people are not engaging with that root anymore. I would say part of it is that you don't have as much stability in academia for professors to be there for decades and support their students in particular ways, because some of it is just takes a lot more time to engage with the primary source directly, than to hear a story about it that you may or may not trust, or even to hear ten different stories about the same source.
Helena McFadzean:
I don't know if this is a controversial thing to say but I think what's important to keep in mind here is also like it's very connected to money, like how we can afford to attribute certain kinds of attention to things. Narrative is definitely one of the most powerful things anyone can handle today, because attention is such a currency.
Morgane Billuart:
When you read those things compared to the things you studied or how you used to write and stuff... What's your reactions/appreciation of those texts? Do you miss these primary sources or?
Anon:
I still engage with the primary source because I was educated in a very systematic way. So I just always think that I don't want someone else to tell me what I should think that directly. I'm also learning other topics which are not related to Media Theory, because one of the things that I'm most interested in is also the distribution of knowledge in general and access to knowledge. Personally I think we are at a dangerous point politically because there's so much market interest, but of course, I find it really interesting that people have access to like science labs outside of the academic context. Before you wouldn't be able to have access to like getting certain chemical compounds analyzed, unless you are in a university or you are in a really high corporate environment, and now you can send it off somewhere and get along. To me that was like the most interesting positive thing for people learning other things. I think, to me, what it means when you don't engage with primary resources is that you don't have time. For whatever reason, you feel a time pressure, and that's I think the most unfortunate thing about our moment in time, there’s both artificial time pressure and a real time pressure because of the precarity of the social conditions.
Anon:
If it makes sense, what becomes the point of this? Aside from what we talked about, the obvious, which is to build, you know, an alternative to different models, existing models, to grow out of the community online and give to people different avenues and pathways to engage in criticism and critical dialog. But what, if anything, is the grand project of the community itself? What are you trying to accomplish? What goals might you have? And I guess sort of the second part of the question I have is if a person or entity becomes an [authority] and it has, you know, a different canological point of view. But if that person or entity becomes enough of an authority for these new people or even a hybrid of both, how do they avoid becoming institutionalized themselves?
Morgane Billuart:
I think it's super interesting that you're asking this question. I want to start with the last one. This is something that I quickly mentioned at the end on “beyond the individualistic”, because actually that's also something that could be dangerous, and this kind of islands of small and lots of critical thinker institutions, that kind of say the same thing but different and instead of working together they’re competing with each other But at the same time, as you said, the problem with growth is that once it becomes too big, it needs its own structural system, and then you start becoming a little bit more like an institution. There’s this idea of scale which is really difficult because you want to be able to have your own school of thought and your own methodologies, but then when something becomes bigger or money gets involved, then you need to like separate things and organize things, which I think is what is happening with Do Not Research, like now they're kind of creating like an NGO around it or something and are discussing how to best deal with it. So that's a very important question to which I don't have an answer, but it's very important to mention it indeed that creating so many small schools of thought is actually doing a disservice to some extent because it's similar but different and at the same time, it's also a manner to keep the scale low so it doesn't become this power figure.
And the first question of what's the point... In the scope of critical internet research, I think it's just doing critical awareness around all these topics that perhaps would not be treated with the same pace and urgency, but that's one thing, of course, but the thing I would say specifically is that there’s this idea, of course, democratization of knowledge, whatever, you could say, vulgarization of knowledge etc., but I think also it's like bringing the critical awareness to a lot more people, because I think that's what comes with this digital plenitude is also the idea that critical thinking, not wanting to say it with like capitals, but is affordable to a lot of people. And although that might sound like, okay, everybody's going to do theory now and there's no more theory. I think it just shows that more people are able to engage with critical discourse and I think that's actually quite a good thing, and bringing it to the personal, for example, when I did the podcast, although some episodes are a bit, I think, obscure because they're so specific. I think for me it was really about trying to think critically and engage with technological progress, because I'm afraid that otherwise, it's just going to keep on growing and expanding in the most market/ optimized way. And I think if more and more people become aware of that, then hopefully, in a best possible world we will have a say. But what's the point? Yeah. It's a good question.
Helena McFadzean:
I think this is really like... Here I really have to think about tactical strategies. You also interviewed Alex Quicho who is doing this whole thing about Girl Theory and the Girlstack and this is also really like a tactical project about how to participate or pragmatically participate or exist in a time or in an era, whatever... I don't know how to phrase this without sounding really cliché, but it's about what are pragmatic ways to continue doing research that is relevant and that is responding to the times. So definitely in that way also it’s a project and an experiment, I would say, but yeah, I would really defer here to, or refer here to this tactical media kind of approach of like, being pragmatic about platform dynamics and their kind of influence on our lives as researchers as well, but thinking about that in a kind of slightly empowering way.
Anon:
Would you say that platform dynamics are different than [human dynamics] or than any dynamics with human involvement? Would you say they have, you know, any specific characteristics to platform dynamics? When you say everything comes down to the attention economy, I'd like to argue that I don't think everything comes down to market logics, but that there's a lot of things beyond that, and then eventually, as the market continues to grow, eventually we will outgrow it with our practices I think. The platform isn't just another marketplace, kind of, or another city center, or however you would like to call it, like another point where people meet and exchange or do you in your research have a specific characteristic to the platform you would say, you know, this is very different?
Helena McFadzean:
The algorithms and artificial intelligence or machine learning changes a lot of things about that. So we're producing knowledge in places that require maybe also like an attunement to this [cyborgian] attention economy.
Morgane Billuart:
If I can add something to this, I think when we can outsmart that, it's when we can bring back the human intelligence. For example, I did a research project which was called SubSight and basically it's just claiming that whatever attention economy we're working with right now is using such big money from advertisers and not redistributing anything. And one example that I can show, which I think is very interesting, is that during the Black Lives Matter, a lot of YouTube channels were making a selection of music from like black artists, and then they were putting on YouTube and they were saying, if the entire world right now goes and sees this YouTube video, the revenue from the ads is going to be so big and this can be redistributed to charity. So there was this idea of how to actually best use the attention economy to disseminate money. You know, those are market logics but maybe there're loopholes that we can best use because we're a little bit smarter than the machine. And I mean, there's like an entire complexity that comes with those questions and stuff but it's just saying that there's those systemic workings of stuff, but perhaps... And I mean, you know, if it was easy, it would already be done, you know? So I don't mean to say it's easy but there are certainly ways to subvert it to our best interests, I think. And that also applies to many different practices that are hosted on the platform, I think.
Anon:
I just wanted to ask, maybe also as a nice end of the conversation. When it comes to network culture, what do you think is the best case scenario that you want to see in five years? And maybe what are some of the things that you're wary of, kind of like the big scope of things?
Morgane Billuart: I wish initially for more people to know and learn and engage in that, so hopefully more and more people feel a concern to demand change from the state or corporations when it comes to the internet and technology. But I'm just a little bit afraid that no matter how many people know, I just really don't know about ethics and regulations of technologies. I really don't know what it will take, actually, because we see more and more the states being very mindful about doing regulations because they're so afraid of corporations going elsewhere, you know, so they're like, oh, we want the added value to our economy and if we put regulation on this, this company is going to go elsewhere. So I feel like as long as there's not a universal banning, it's going to be super hard to regulate. So I feel like for me, the initial, let's say, ideology that I had when I started doing this, I was like, okay, more awareness, more critical thinking about technology maybe leads to more demand and then structural change, but now that we see how this market interest is shaping everything, I'm just more thinking maybe we all get the toolbox to create alternative media, alternative platforms, and I know it's not super revolutionary because it's only a few people, but I just don't really know anymore if we can rely on the states to regulate these kind of things. I don't know, I don't know. I don't want to sound too doomed, but I'm just seeing it more and more specifically thinking about AI, for example.
If AI is meant to stay, it would be amazing if all the corporations that are making millions on the back of artists, writers, translators and stuff could redistribute or would have to redistribute 20% of their tax income to funding. You would think, okay, let's just bring this back into the loop so young people can do something about it, but they just... I don't think they are going to do it, because if you implement this and you say, okay, friends, you do that, they will be like, yeah, sure, I'm going to go to Ireland. And then, you know, it's always going to be this endless, like chasing the best place to make more profits. But I don't know, I feel like maybe there's demand. I know that in Australia right now they're discussing this. I don't know to what extent, but [they are discussing the use] of artists’ private property being fed into AIs. But you know what's terrible is that apparently, from what I heard, I don't know the details of it, but that the tech companies are working with very slim, low terms that make a difference in the sense of saying, oh, but we're not copying, we're learning. So in the book of law, it's not stealing. You know, it's like all the possible ways will be used to just basically don't have to redistribute. And, I don't know, I don't want to be too... I don't know what we can do. But that was my initial ideology. And I feel like now seeing that states and corporations don't seem to really care so much, maybe, yeah, creating alternative platforms, creating alternative discourses, maybe opting out of the platforms, which I am not doing myself. I admit. But. Yeah, that's my take.