Episode Transcript
27.1 Communicative Capitalism versus Instagram Activism
Matthew Remski: Welcome, Patreons, to episode 27.1 of the Antifascist Dad Podcast, Communicative Capitalism versus Instagram Activism. This is the follow-up episode to my interview with Jane Yearwood, also known as Leftie Jane. For housekeeping, you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. And the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast. If you're listening to this on the day of publication, you already know that. If you're not, you can get episodes like this early if you subscribe, because that's the deal. Every part two of the main feed episodes gets uploaded exactly when the part one is uploaded to the main feed. And so you can get both at the same time.
And also I would direct you once again to pre-order, or perhaps order depending upon when you're listening to this, my book. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. The link is in the show notes.
So I have been having a little bit of a social media run on this podcast over the past two weeks. It was a delight to talk with Ciarra Jones about her theology of gardening and its relationship to antifascism. And I loved chatting with my fellow Torontonian Leftie Jane Yearwood about her vibrant and accessible coverage of the very mannerly and polite surge of proto-fascism in Mark Carney's Canada, and also about things like her postcard writing gatherings and her obsession with libraries.
These are two folks doing great work online who I met online through this work, but have now also gotten a little bit closer with by visiting in the online studio space. So it's kind of like in between. We meet each other through social media interactions and then I reach out through direct messages and then there's usually some sort of planning and mutual excitement about what we're going to talk about. I send some themes and some questions and then I also will invite the guest to the Riverside studio where we do the recording. And so there's this progression of public to more private conversational spaces. And that's how it works.
The last step would be actually meeting the person in person. And I've done that with Sarah Kaplan because she's living here now in Toronto. I'm not sure when I would be able to have a cup of tea with Ciarra in California, given the risks of traveling across the border in a fascist era. But I do plan to meet Jane sometime, maybe down in Kensington Market.
Also, a few weeks back, over on Conspirituality, I published a eulogy for another online friend, Joseph Baker, who I connected with over radical politics, but also the unlikely subject of his love for A Course in Miracles, which is a text that I don't like very much because it helped recruit me into a high-demand group about 25 years ago.
All of this is to say I've got the mystery of online life and activism on my mind. And then, as so often happens, my intellectual radar found a shard of theory to help me think in a troubled way about how it's all working, or actually how most of the time my online experience is not working at all. But then occasionally the sun breaks through the code.
Now, I referred to that shard of theory at the end of my conversation with Leftie Jane when I asked her about communicative capitalism, which is a concept I've been reading about in the work of Marxist philosopher Jodi Dean. Communicative capitalism goes a long way in explaining what does not work in the realm of online life. And I first came across her work through her book called Comrade, which examines the old communist principle of friendship through equality and shared struggle. I'm going to try to get her onto the show for an interview, so more on that later.
But in this theme of how do we relate to each other, Dean really zeroed in early on on social media and became a very prescient observer of its technology and its relationship to democracy and capitalism. As early as 2005, Dean had peered into the economy of blogging, message boards, and other precursors to our modern social platforms and had noticed something eerie. She has two related sentences that I think really sum it up.
The first: the exchange value of messages overtakes their use value. And the second: communicativity hinders communication.
Okay, before I go further into Dean's framework of communicative capitalism, I'm going to go right back to Marx's Capital to define some terms.
So what is use value? Marx writes, the utility of a thing makes it a use value. And more fully, he writes, use values become a reality only by use or consumption. They also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth.
Okay, so let me make that practical. As I write this, I am immersed in a world of things that I use, that are useful in their ability to satisfy a want or a need that I have. My fingers are on this keyboard, causing letters to flow from left to right on a screen. But if I draw my attention up from my fingertips, I can feel the cuffs of my sweater, knit by my late mother. The fibers are mostly soft, but also slightly firm, and the warmth of my arms somehow reminds me of her face. And I feel my heart begin to glow. I am held by things that I value as I use and experience them.
Now, what if I had to tally up the replacement cost of these things for an insurance application? Or what if I wanted to realize some value from this sweater so that I could use it to purchase something else? How would I possibly do that? How could I put a price to that work and care and love? With what would I replace that particular quality of warmth, which can't really be measured by a thermometer?
That process of evaluation seems impossible. It seems like a fiction. And yet, if my back were against the wall, if I were hungry and I couldn't eat the sweater, obviously, then I would be forced to compare this sweater with other sweaters, to put the issue of their manufacture aside, to forget everyone else's mothers or everybody working in sweater factories and their lives, and to say, what would the market reasonably return on this sweater today? And then I would pick the most appropriate number, and that number would represent the exchange value of the sweater.
And as soon as I begin the sequence of machinations to extract that price, that money, from a buyer, this is taking pictures of it, loading the pictures into eBay or Kijiji, the use value evaporates, the object changes in my hands. I must emotionally divest myself. I have to look at the sweater as though I was a different person than the one who used it, the one who was warmed by it, the one who it was made for, because I was loved.
Marx writes, exchange value at first sight presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place.
Okay, so the constantly changing piece is really important, because while the warmth and love of the sweater is qualitative, while it can't be measured, the exchange value price of the sweater isn't informed by that experience at all, but rather by an infinite number of abstract comparisons with, as I said, other sweaters and what markets are willing to pay for them. And while the love and warmth of my mother's work does not change, I mean, memory changes, you get used to things, you can become numb to the gifts of your life, but for the most part these are spiritual and not ontological questions. The market value of the sweater is changing all the time based on factors you cannot see or comprehend, factors you must simply be the observer of.
Now, it's hard to really capture what a profound reorientation this is, and yet it is so worth meditating on, because it is a fault line in the human experience. On one side you are living with things, and on the other side things have become the bearers of money, of exchange value.
And what Jodi Dean is getting at with communicative capitalism is the moment in which our communication goes from the status of a sweater that fulfills your need for warmth and care to the moment in which our communication becomes an object with which we can purchase other commodities like attention or power.
And when I go through my often lonely days of producing antifascist materials to feed into a discourse machine, I am very often in that netherworld of alienation. And so when something happens that brings the use value back into my sensations of being alive, I know that it is different. And I want to understand why.
Part of that difference is expressed in the root of Marx's theory. He writes, as use values, commodities are above all of different qualities. But as exchange values, they are merely different quantities and consequently do not contain an atom of use value.
And the last part of the theory that I'll cover today might be obvious, but it speaks to what exchange value actually is. Marx writes, as values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labor time.
So my sweater, when I use it, holds my mother's labor, which is expressed and palpable through warmth and coziness. But it loses those sensual and emotional qualities as it transforms into a commodity. The buyer might attribute warmth and coziness to the purchase, but they will never know my mother's labor. For them, it is just congealed labor time, assigned a market value by forces that none of us can understand. It's like my mother dies again, but instead of melting back into the earth, her labor, if I sold the sweater, melts into a global network of math.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels write, all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.
Okay, so hopefully that's a bit of a foundation. Let me get into Dean's specifics.
We start with something painful. Communicative capitalism is a political economic formation in which the ideals of democratic communication, things like participation, inclusion, dialogue and access, have been captured and monetized by networked media platforms, producing a system that appears democratic while systematically undermining collective political agency.
A lot of Dean's analysis revolves around something she calls the contribution trap. This is the principle that in networked media, every message, post or expression of opinion loses its use value as it circulates as a commodity, even when the non-remunerative nature of the platform makes users feel like they are contributing or participating. And users contribute in the shadow of an incentive, a false incentive, that your contribution will really make a difference, or that it can begin to generate income.
Now, from the point of view of the platform, messages do not exist to communicate meaning or build solidarity. They exist to generate traffic, engagement and data, the raw material of platform profit. And the more people who get on board, the more the system benefits economically, regardless of whether that participation produces any stable political or social effect. Messages become things that circulate rather than exchanges that obligate response or action.
So what's downstream of this? Dean points to two wounds. First, she details the problem of reflexive communication, or people who send messages into circuits that absorb and reflect them back, which creates the feeling of political engagement, but maybe not its substance. So the tweet, the petition signature, the outraged share, these can satisfy the psychological need to act without generating the organized and sustained pressure that can actually challenge power.
Then Dean talks about the fantasy of participation, that the sheer abundance of voices and viewpoints creates the illusion of democratic vitality, even as the structural power of the corporate network consolidates around this mass of lucrative data. The algorithms, of course, also create filter bubbles that reinforce in-group views.
Now Dean also uses a psychoanalytic angle, and to do this she uses the thought of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his ideas around desire to say that within communicative capitalism networks, the compulsion of repeating your scrolling, posting and reacting, all of this replaces the impulse that might otherwise be oriented toward political relationships or goals. So the system produces enjoyment and frustration in this kind of endless self-serving loop that stays in place.
And there's a lot of mimicry going on in communicative capitalism because contributions can resemble political speech, because they take the form of address, assertion, argument, demand. But they play out in a space in which the basic reciprocity of actual political speech doesn't really apply, because there's no obligatory response, there's no building towards decisions, there's no functioning relationships built on accountability.
And I think it also means that networked followership can mimic solidarity. You can have a shared identity, a common enemy, and a mutual recognition of each other without the juice that makes solidarity effective. So durability, discipline, sacrifice, and the space of collective decision-making.
So all of that sounds like very bad news. But like with most bad news that comes with encountering a good piece of critical theory, I find it very relieving to have some clarity with regard to the things that I'm already feeling and sort of navigating every day.
Previously, my awareness of social media entrapment was really well supported by theories of gamification and value capture articulated by Thi Nguyen, but that focus was less on economy than it was on how the algorithmic feedback incentivizes us to change our values so that we search for sticky punchlines and we forego nuance. Nguyen is so essential for understanding how communicative capitalism disfigures our thinking that I included it in this new book I've got coming out. But he doesn't use a capitalism framework directly.
So what is going on in these moments in which abstraction and alienation lifts? So I'm sitting in the same chair. I'm talking with Ciarra or Jane or Richard Gilman-Opalsky or Ben Case or Nathan Evan Fox on my same teleprompter. I'm using all of the objects that normally transform my messages into content commodities. But I feel the opposite happening. And so what is going on?
I think it's a risky move to think or believe that somehow one finds a special hack that transcends one's material conditions. To say that because I really connected with this person, we must be part of a new economy. That's obviously not true. But something is different. And maybe it's that on both sides of these screens sit people who want to reach through them toward each other.
I know that when my partner had to abruptly move her psychotherapy practice onto video format during the pandemic, there were initial hurdles, but everybody made it work. And a lot of people in psychotherapy were surprised at how well video sessions worked. And why was that? I think it's because there's a lot of training involved backing it up. But more basically, there is a mutual intention that the subjects are there to relate to each other. That conversation has a super high use value. And then even the exchange value aspect of it resisted alienation because, with my partner, rates were negotiable based on circumstance.
So I'm thinking about all of this with much more fervor and worry because I'm on a bit of a run on Instagram. In January, to build support for this book, I committed to posting a three-minute reel of political commentary every day on either some timely news item that intersects with the book or some broader evergreen theme that the book relates to.
Now, when I started doing this, my Instagram account was around 3,000 followers, and recently it has crossed over 50,000. That is a 460% monthly growth rate, which sounds impressive, but because it's based on a few lottery-win viral moments, it's also ephemeral. It conceals something. It won't last.
Typically, as accounts get bigger, growth inevitably slows, gradually dipping down towards around 11% monthly, which is sort of common as an account approaches a million followers. Not that I'm anywhere close to that, but there's a downward turn as the follower count grows. Mid to large accounts tend to slow down because the algorithm stops giving them the early boost and starts showing posts primarily to existing followers.
So I'm now at the upper edge of what they call the micro-influencer bracket of follower counts, between 10 and 50,000. I'm crossing into that next tier and my engagement rate growth will also slow. Right now it averages at around 60%, while accounts moving into the 50 to 100,000 follower range see engagement diploma consistently.
So I seem to be at a threshold where a dip tends to occur. And using Dean's model, it probably has something to do with a transition from use value intimacy to exchange value abstraction. It's like feeling some multiple of Dunbar's number explode in the space around me. Dunbar was the anthropologist who said that with anything above 150 networked social relations, we become abstracted to each other. Like, you just can't keep track of the personal details in order to have intimate relationships with more than 150 people. It just doesn't work with regard to our brain size.
Now, shouldn't I feel proud about all this growth? Didn't the algorithm decide that my antifascist Marxist and gutter Catholic content had higher use value than, let's say, the emergency care workers who take care of unhoused indigenous people here in Toronto, and who post their activities and their wins and their appeals to the government?
No, it didn't decide that my content had higher use value. It decided my content had higher exchange value. But then it has also told me that it has lower exchange value than content that comes out of Scott Galloway.
Now, as Dean predicts, Instagram extracts exchange value from my labor without compensating me, except through the lottery of exposure. So my followers become assets of the platform and together we build Instagram's network power, TikTok's advertiser metrics and their view of what content drives engagement.
So in communicative capitalism, my accounts can grow not because I invest in my interpersonal relationships, but because I actually escape them through the spectacle of charisma and its abstractions. So 50,000 followers become an imagined community.
So what can I do about this? How can I mitigate this demoralizing feeling and condition of abstraction and commodification?
My own personal warmth in conversation with Jane Yearwood is not something that scales, so I can keep nurturing it, if only for my mental health. But I also think I have to figure out how to make positive contributions. And maybe I can do that by starting with thinking about my own ethics.
That might start with an inventory, because as the account has grown, I've been having these sneaky little thoughts like, well, what will work today? What's current? What do these people want to hear? How can I give them what they want? It's really like plotting out some sort of investment strategy for the week. And there's a short walk from running content with that mindset and day trading for kicks. When I hear those questions in myself, I have to say, not today, Satan.
Somehow I have to ask different questions, like: what resources can I share today? How much time can I take to really engage comments? Should I issue corrections? Whose work can I promote? How do I not become infrastructure? Did I leave this app every day with more capacity to connect or less? Did I help the follower do the same, even if they are too many to imagine? Did I punch down or horizontally in any way? Is my little capitalist prison cell of performance and possible paralysis a generative space? Am I breaking through the bars?
I don't think these questions will erase my technological alienation or put my labor power back into my hands. But I think that starting to think about them, especially with other people, will help contribute to an understanding of our shared condition.
Thanks for listening everybody. That's it for now. It's not exactly complete as a set of thoughts. I'm sure I'll be exploring this more. I'm happy to hear your feedback on it. I'd be very interested to hear what you have to say. And until then, do take care of each other.
