# Components > Between value and valuation. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### About URL: https://components.news/about/ Last updated: 2026-06-11T03:23:38.000Z Components is a media and analytics company that builds technology to make the values expressed in markets intelligible. We are led by a group with a combined background in data science, computer science, journalism and market research. All of our research is conducted with our own data platform. To speak about working with us, contact mail@components.news. ## People #### Andrew Thompson Andrew Thompson is the founder of Components. He has worked as data editor of *Fast Company* and Ceros and led the team that refactored Uber's knowledge base. He is one of a handful of researchers whose work led to adjustments in a Google algorithm. He lives in New York. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewsthompson/?ref=components.news) [X](https://twitter.com/asthompson?ref=components.news) [Instagram](https://instagram.com/stay%5Ffussy%5F?ref=components.news) #### Jules Becker Jules Becker is a software engineer. His computer science background began in artificial intelligence and has included financial products, language models, and software for builders and architects. He is a musician and lives in New York. [Website](https://www.jules-becker.com/?ref=components.news) #### Kyle Paoletta Kyle Paoletta is the author of *American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest* and a contributing writer at *Columbia Journalism Review*. His reporting and criticism regularly appears in *Harper's*, *The Nation*, and *The Baffler*. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-paoletta-010b2813b/?ref=components.news) [X](https://x.com/KPaoletta?ref=components.news) #### Chris Good Chris Good lives in Chicago. He has worked in market research, community journalism, corporate public relations and arts publishing. [X](https://twitter.com/scanpaths?ref=components.news) #### Tiger Dingsun Tiger Dingsun is a web developer and graphic designer based in NYC. He is also the web producer at *Triple Canopy*. Other interests include fandom studies, paleo-archaeology, Jungian psychoanalysis, and the poetics of the digital quotidian. [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/tiger.dingsun?ref=components.news) ## Posts ### Not your keys, not your songs URL: https://components.news/not-your-keys-not-your-songs-nina-protocol/ Last updated: 2026-07-14T21:45:45.000Z ## Summary - Nina Protocol, a VC-backed web3 music startup, promised to compensate artists, change music discovery, and make independent music hosting permanent and independent. - It’s understood that they failed on these counts, but the magnitude of that failure has been underestimated: only about $50,000 was spent on Nina throughout the platform's lifetime, with the vast majority of releases going uncollected. - Nina ultimately failed to articulate (or realize) an alternative to Bandcamp or Spotify. Others may manage. --- **Update (7/14/26):* After publication, we learned that when Nina Protocol migrated to a new on-chain protocol in 2025, approximately 6,500 early releases were dropped from its web catalogue and left stranded on Solana, unavailable for purchase. We’ve updated all-time spending figures with records from the blockchain.* No one had been anxiously anticipating the moment we’d finally be able to collect and sell digital music via decentralized ledgers. But for a moment in the 2020s, when VCs were throwing good money after bad in hopes of convincing us that we’d been waiting for web3 all along, the music platform Nina Protocol could make the case that cryptocurrency-powered music hosting would upend the economics of music streaming and lend the recordings themselves a permanence beyond corporate entities. Even if Nina died, the music would live on the blockchain forever. Today, their site uses a few different euphemisms — it is an “offramp,” they are “winding down” — but what they really mean to tell you is that it's all over. Two days after Componentsstarted researching this piece, Nina Protocol’s web catalogue was shut down. Next Wednesday, the website will go offline. When that happens, it will be as if Nina never existed at all. For the uninitiated, Nina was an online music marketplace founded in 2021 by a few indie lifers. This alone would put it in the company of about a dozen Bandcamp clones, but for one very special difference: Nina was built on the blockchain platform Solana, which meant that in the early 2020s web3 hype cycle, it could attract a round of seed funding from five co-investors and end up in the portfolio of Greenfield Capital, where it sat between world-beaters like “a liquidity aggregator connecting multiple decentralized exchanges” and “the company behind CryptoKitties.” PitchBook supplies no dollar figure, but given that they operated for nearly four years post-raise with a handful of full-time staff and no profits, it’s hard to imagine a number under seven figures. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-03-at-1.16.51---PM.png) In early interviews, Nina’s founders would set out their mission to “ascribe value to digital music in an entirely new way.” You could be forgiven for not seeing why cryptocurrency was an essential part of this formulation; if to sign with a label is to swim through a [sixty-yard trench of shit,](https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music?ref=components.news) then the mechanics of on-chain listenership and distribution amounted to a backstroke in the opposite direction. All payments might go to the artist on Nina, but the artist would be saddled with publishing fees contingent on the vagaries of Solana’s market. Listeners would need to manage a Solana wallet and the accompanying [microtransactions](https://help.ninaprotocol.com/hc/en-us/articles/14334231448855-What-are-the-fees-when-using-Nina?ref=components.news) or, in the case of the “[first collector](https://help.ninaprotocol.com/hc/en-us/articles/35481572390423-What-s-a-first-collector?ref=components.news),” cover upfront hosting costs in exchange for a cut of future fees. Why bother? Greenfield's argument for web3 in music was essentially that it could function as a goodie bag delivery mechanism (complete with “token-gated digital experiences” and “tangible fan services, like exclusive Discord channels with artists or free NFT airdrops”). Nina itself pointed to more highminded ideals (democratization, decentralization). But beneath all this was a familiar promise, the same made by every other Bandcamp alternative: that Nina would bring about a new model for artist compensation, permanent music collection, and discovery sans algorithms: “music online as it should be.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/07/Nina-Protocol-Illustration-.png) This was apparently a selling point This did not come to pass. Despite Nina's efforts to “release independent music from the grips of Big Streaming” and the “attention lottery,” demand proved scarce on Nina, and what demand *did* exist was no more or less concentrated than on any other music platform. What’s remarkable, then, is not just that about 77% of Nina’s roughly 37,000 listings went uncollected, but just how low the ceiling was: if your Nina release was collected just five times, it was sitting at the 97th percentile. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/07/nina-chart-2-1.png) If Nina attracted VC funding with the aim of changing how music was bought and sold forever, then by 2025, they had been cowed into more modest aspirations. One Nina cofounder told *Rolling Stone* last October that it would be enough “if \[they\] ever hit ten percent of Bandcamp’s daily volume.” The issue is that Nina failed to clear .01% of Bandcamp’s volume. By our math The number of collectors for each paid release, multiplied by the price of each release, calculated across Nina’s entire catalogue, excluding Community Revenue Share fees. Nina's FAQ states that release prices could not be altered, and makes no mention of pay what you can pricing. For releases that were delisted from Nina’s web catalogue, we’ve drawn spending estimates from Solana. , about $50k was spent on Nina over the course of its lifetime, compared with the $151 million in sales Bandcamp processed in 2025 alone. And so far as we can tell, Nina earned no money whatsoever from *any* activity on the platform until October 2025, when a $1 “Community Revenue Share” was tacked onto every transaction — 50¢ of which would go directly to “Nina platform operations.” The only thing that Nina's Faustian bargain with blockchain would seem to guarantee, then, was permanence: “If we shut down tomorrow, the music would still be there,” Nina’s Mike Pollard told *Rolling Stone*. He’s right. Every release uploaded to Nina is intact and whole, somewhere out there in an Arweave server. All you need to do is dig their program ID out of their GitHub or a block explorer; run a getProgramAccounts query against that program filtered to accounts where the authority field equals your pubkey (which requires knowing the account's byte layout and the offset where the publisher key sits), which requires you to deserialize with Nina's Anchor IDL from the SDK — and Public RPC endpoints also throttle or disable getProgramAccounts because it's expensive, so you may need a paid node — and then parse out the Arweave pointer each account holds. If you did eventually make your way to your Chanel Beads LP, you'd find it riding out eternity in a tranche with Pudgy Penguins; as Rachel Adjogah noted in a 2025 blog post, Arweave uses Irys to bundle the different NFTs it hosts. ## Between value and valuation Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Through all this, Nina had produced one thing which might not revolutionize how people related to music, but which would at least mark a positive project: its editorial wing, which fostered a fairly devoted community. But all the blockchain in the world could not keep this from being shunted into oblivion while the team “looks into \[archive\] options.” So, Nina was shuttered for reasons that are not only endemic to the sector (e.g. Juno Download and [Resonate's ](https://resonate.coop/?ref=components.news)recent closures) but embarrassingly particular to the great DIY-WAGMI mésalliance. For all the insistence on permanent ownership, Nina has left its community out to dry in precisely the same way, and for precisely the same reason, as the numberless dead startups before it: because a small team of people moved on when the salaries ran out. We would stop beating this horse if not for the even more interesting questions raised by this failure. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/07/675.133-2-1.jpg) One question is what Greenfield and co. thought they were doing. Did they *really* think they were investing in the next great American music listening platform? The firm’s own writeup on Nina [referred to the platform's NFTs](https://greenfield.xyz/2022/10/12/backing-nina/?ref=components.news) as “one-of-a-kind digital vinyls” (sic), which does not suggest that they did their due diligence (or understood music much at all), but squint and you can see why Nina fit a web3 firm’s thesis: if there were any common ground between the respective fantasies of NFTdom and scenedom, it would be that you and I might charge a finders’ fee for getting there first (as made literal by the First Collector model). It’s trite to point out that crypto was always a play for speculation; obviously it was. More than that, however, it was a cynical assumption that our whole culture was just as speculative as it was. Another question is what Nina thought it was doing. We know the team operated on investor funding while bringing in zero revenue for the three years prior to the $1 Community Revenue Fee (with which it continued to earn essentially nothing). This suggests that the strategy was to follow in the footsteps of so many startups before them and *scale* — that is, burn VC cash and draw an audience in hopes of extracting a profit from them later. The boom-bust mentality and reliance on external capital that this engenders is obviously at practical and ideological odds with a stable independent music scene. It is also, incidentally, a description of Spotify’s business model from its founding until two years ago. So while I can’t really fault them for taking money from Palm Tree DAO and using it to bankroll music writers and live nights, it's wholly unsurprising that this failed to reverse the general debasement of music marketplaces or effect any lasting change in the world around them. As the old joke goes: that’s fine and well in practice, but what about the theory? For all these issues, however, the most puzzling question may be why Nina had to die as any kind of going concern at all. Why they failed as a corporation is obvious. But to answer the Instagram user who commented on their obituary, “can we crowdfund to save nina please we can’t have a platform this good shutting down”: yes, Nina could have been entirely crowdfunded. It’s possible that Nina, at zero revenue after four years, was forced to close so its investors could claim a write-down, against the founders’ wishes. That’s only possible if investors had a majority share of board seats, which would be highly unusual for a seed-stage company. In the unlikely event Nina did give them a majority share of the board, then this was a worse decision than putting the music on Solana. One option would be to jam econo: rip out the web3 wiring, store all the music in Cloudflare R2 buckets, hook up Stripe payments, cancel their salaries, and run the whole thing with some cash from a few Patreon supporters. But then Nina would have found themselves with Bandcamp. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/07/mvvlsbi4zjeurxboexcn.webp) Star Wars Galaxies players went through something similar So did even Nina believe Nina wasworth sticking out? If you feel the need to take your failing business off life support, that's your prerogative — and to paraphrase [another set of New York scenesters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvlyDMzwAB4&ref=components.news), “just because a movement ceases to exist doesn’t mean it was a failure.” But one wonders just how many Bandcamp alternatives will cease to exist before one *works*. In the later years, you could sense that the Nina team was a little embarrassed by the crypto millstone around its neck — or could at least see which way the wind was blowing. In 2024, Pollard told an interviewer he felt “the benefits of blockchain \[could\] be delivered without having to fully drink the Kool-Aid.” A pointed distinction between Nina's “semi-fungible tokens” and NFTs was added to the FAQ. *Coindesk* got no further interviews. And yet, by dropping its community and calling it a day when the VC money ran dry, Nina proved it could rugpull with the best of them. But when [ninaprotocol.com](http://ninaprotocol.com/?ref=components.news) does go offline next Wednesday, it will leave behind some of the most viable new ways of hearing since Soulseek. On [Cantilever](https://www.cantilever-music.com/?ref=components.news), listeners are presented with a rotation of albums, impermanence by design. It brings context not with immutable and inalterable ledgers, but with good old-fashioned editorial. [Mirlo](https://mirlo.space/?ref=components.news) has stuck to its open-source commitments and facilitated merch sales while operating as a co-op. [Subvert](https://www.subvert.fm/?ref=components.news), too, has made it out of the bylaws (and made good on the promise of its $100 zine) with that rarest of things: a functional community-run platform. If we take their homepage’s word for it, then six weeks on from launch, it hosts more artists than Nina did in its lifetime. ### Biology knows no prestige URL: https://components.news/biology-knows-no-prestige/ Last updated: 2026-08-12T20:25:02.000Z ## Summary - Price affects product interest within beauty categories differently. At Sephora, skincare interest drops by about 50% with every unit increase in price. Fragrance does the opposite, rising 25%. Makeup barely moves at all. - These different responses to price are a function of where the products sit on an axis of two kinds of value: technological (where objective systems with stable meanings dominate) and contingent (a space of relationality and unstable meaning). As a general rule, skincare is technological, fragrance is contingent, and makeup straddles the line. - Knowing which space a product occupies is fundamental to knowing how to position a product. It helps explain the success of The Ordinary's 2024 marketing campaign, and Rhode's strategy of splitting technological and contingent value propositions between its skincare and accessories. It also leads to the hypothesis that, in economic downturns, people will downgrade luxury items only within market spaces (i.e., from Bottega to Dior fragrance), but not across them (from Bottega to La Mer). --- There are two ideas of what the world is, and from them, two ideas of what beauty is. You are a personal shopper for two clients; you have accounts at two stores for both kinds. “Buy me things to make me beautiful,” says the first, who believes beauty is harmony and symmetry, the geometric average of all human faces, that there exists in the cosmos a blueprint for perfection and what is beautiful has studied its designs. At the first store, you purchase some peptide cocktail, a bottle of retinol, a canister of minoxidil, a 660nm red light therapy mask, a treadmill, a water purifier, and a gift certificate for a rhinoplasty. The second client believes beauty is her lover’s scar, the smell of slightly turned plums from childhood, barefaced one day and nail extensions the next, something we hear as a beholder and can only be glimpsed through their eyes, and when she tells you to also buy her things to make her beautiful, you go to the second store and buy a bottle of Baccarat Rouge 540 (not every client can pull it off, but you know this one can), Patrick Ta bronzer and Kylie mascara, a pair of cheap silver hoop earrings, the same Cartier Tank her mom had, and a satin slip. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/image-1-1.png) you and your two clients Compartmentalizing retail along these lines, as we'll argue in a moment, makes at least as much sense as having Fenty down the aisle from gua sha stones. What do they have in common? From the standpoint of underlying value structures, about as much as balloon animals and iron ore. If we want to examine the dynamics of price and demand within beauty and the worlds they belong to, there are few places that offer a better opportunity than Sephora, where each product page displays a product’s love count. Unlike reviews, which are often fragile indicators, love counts are left by signed in users, harder to fake, and appear to closely mirror the documented revenue of the store’s products (e.g., the Summer Fridays Lip Butter Balm Treatment is both the store’s most successful product and the product with the highest love counts). Whether any given addition to a person’s wish list counts as a purchase or a desire to purchase is of less consequence than the fact that both of those things, in aggregate, constitute demand. So how does that demand signal correlate with the prices of the products? Here's skincare: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/skincare-6.9.26-1.png) So as price goes up, shopper interest goes down, which is more or less what we’d expect: a smaller market for more expensive goods. What we might *not* expect is that fragrance has exactly the opposite relationship between prices and love counts: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/fragrance-6.9.26-1.png) If we do the same for makeup, pull out trend lines, and put these three categories all in one place, we see all three goods pointing in different directions: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/comparison-6.9.26-2.png) To varying degrees, brands claim that the value of their product is more than the sum of its inputs. People are most receptive to this claim when it is a fragrance — that as price goes up, something of greater value is being purchased. They believe this claim with makeup as often as they disbelieve it. They mostly fail to accept the claim from a skincare brand. This is the market’s gut instinct about what things are, and its intuitive grasp of the axis that underlies the whole universe. --- Different terminologies at best gesture towards all of this. There are search goods vs. credence goods, rational vs. irrational actors, products vs. “the experience economy”, and so on. None fully correspond to the two underlying assertions about the world from which they emerge. Let’s instead say that this opposition between people’s positions towards skincare, makeup and fragrance results from their position within two different market spaces that emerge from two competing ontologies: the technological and the contingent. In their theoretically purest forms, technological things are static, literal, objective, and impersonal. When turned into products, they are evaluated by their ability to effectuate some end — if there is no yield to the product, the product has no value. Because goods are reducible to their constituent parts, they can be compared with other goods based solely on those parts. This is the world of utility maximization, Plato, Eli Lilly, financial markets, effective altruism, cloud computing, lightbulbs, engine coolant, dish soap, crystal methamphetamine, and withdrawal. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/dish-soap-1.jpeg) various bottles of technology Contingent things are relational, metaphoric, and personal. Their very meaning is co-created by their intercourse with other things, and their goods have no easily quantifiable framework of evaluation. Knowing that two films were both directed by Paul Schrader and star George C. Scott tells you nothing about what they are; it’s not until you watch the film that you know. The meaning and value of contingent things is not unlocked until you actually perceive and experience them, and that value is unstable across time, person and place. This is the world of language, profligacy, Wittgenstein, dogs, existentialism, Loro Piana, Mario Kart, cocktails, and grief. ## For everything across the axis Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. In technological space, goods are reducible to their inputs *because the outcome is reducible to its outputs.* Everyone agrees very specifically on what the good is supposed to do. What’s an antibiotic supposed to do? Kill a host’s infectious agents while killing as little of the host as possible. That outcome is a list of delineable, easily quantified objectives. No one disagrees on what any of this means because the drug’s objective, and the optimal means of achieving that objective, wasn’t designed by any of us. It’s part of a system, “out there”, that we detachedly examine. The value of the antibiotic is a conversation entirely between the compound and the biological system. Some drugs will do it poorly, others will do it better, and some will do it best. And so antibiotics, like any technological good, have a global optimum, a really existing Right Way to do something, whether we’ve discovered it or not. In this space, people are invested solely in the outcome and indifferent to the specific good itself. There is nothing to want beyond exactly what you wanted. With contingent goods, the abstraction occurs on both sides of the input-output equation: the outputs are at least somewhat irreducible, so the inputs are also somewhat irreducible. Answering what makes a good dog is no easier than providing a universal answer for what a dog is supposed to do. While people are indifferent to their antibiotics, they are not indifferent towards their dogs. Because of this, there is no universally best dog or cocktail or movie. And it’s precisely because of your experience of either of them that they contain value. We can agree on the value of antifreeze, but not of a Balenciaga Le City bag, because the purse is more than the cows skinned for it. And if we ask whether this bag *works,* even an infinite amount of answers in the affirmative will only ever amount to n=1\. The world can never reach a global consensus about a contingent good. Insofar as it can work, it may work for you alone. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/poodles-1.jpg) the impossibility of global consensus on a dog's ideal output creates a highly diverse market spanning a wide range of capabilities and varieties of fur The purest technological goods, then, converge onto efficiencies — once the world has discovered the contemporaneous Right Way to treat cholera or prevent photoaging or deliver the internet, all that’s left is a race to either A) chart the coordinates of a new global optimum through a new discovery or B) do so for as cheaply as possible. Pharmaceuticals operate by technological market logic in its most distilled form. Pfizer discovers a new compound to target lymphoma. It receives a patent and charges as much for the drug as possible. If it works better than other drugs targeting the same outcome, it sells more than the other drug. The patent expires in 20 years until generic manufacturers enter the market all at once and exert precipitous downward pressure on price. Pfizer then develops a new input to optimize a new outcome, the new patent expires, and the cycle continues. That’s technological space. Can you guess which space love goes in? Consider the cliche: you are rounding the corner and crash into them and your belongings fall to the ground. They help you pick them up and you look at them and wow, there they are, you start talking, etc etc. Two months later you tell your friend that you love them, and they ask you what you love about them. Let’s continue the trope; what do you say? They’re “smart” and “funny” and “beautiful” which really translates to, they make the world more meaningful, they activate a childhood delight, and your desire for them is a reverberation from a place whose origins are lost to you. What you would never say is, they have a high IQ, they can make a joke and usually 70% of people in the room laugh, that their cheekbones-to-chin ratio is a solid 3:2 or whatever the looksmaxxers say it should be, because they might not have either and whether they do is irrelevant, and if you were able to reduce it to any of these things it wouldn’t really be love at all but rather the very definition of nihilism, because then the person would be fungible. And so you met this person through a series of but-for events of being in the right place at the right time, that by its very unnecessity, the very fact that it did not have to happen and almost did not, is paradoxically what makes it feel like it *had* to happen. And if forced to describe what the love is at gunpoint you can’t, because none of these words (smart, funny, whatever) reliably translate to what someone else would think of these terms, because there’s nothing universal about any of it. Its very potency is that it cannot be articulated by enumerating its inputs, and it’s only through your experience of them that it exists at all. --- As a very base rule, skincare veers to a technological market space and fragrance sits almost entirely in a contingent one, while makeup straddles the line between the two. Like engine coolant, skincare has one goal, and that goal is to counter dermatological entropy. And just as there are infinite forms a cracked egg can take but only one way it can exist in its precracked form, the reversal of dermatological entropy — via elasticity or texture or sun spots or moisture barriers — will always aim towards either uncracking the egg or at least slowing down the rate at which it cracks further. Your opinion toward hyaluronic acid serum does not constitute what it *is* or have any bearing on its efficacy. You are not likely to get terribly attached to hyaluronic acid, but even if you were to hyperfixate on hyaluronic acid, its function as a humectant would be unchanged. When skincare makes a promise, that promise is delineated in the clinical language of technology (“Reduces pore visibility by 72% in 4 weeks” and so on). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/margot-robbie-chanel.png) Makeup occasionally and increasingly speaks this language. Dior promises no retouch for 24 hours, and as the latest wave has adopted more clinical ingredients, it can boast of its hydrating properties, its peptides, and so on. But this language is not its mother tongue. Instead, lipstick gets Margot Robbie. Both demonstrate that the product “works”; it's just that contingent functionality does not translate against technological criteria. So what are makeup’s irreducible inputs? First, the pigment, which is inseparable from the technique: not in its longevity or durability, but in its color and consistency, which act on the eye of the beholder and not the lipid barrier of the wearer. In terms of raw material inputs, two lipsticks may be functionally identical. But even slight variations in the manufacturing process can result in different textures and tones *—* which, further downstream, encourage different ways of wearing, from fresh-faced to full-beat. Each outcome may well be a success or a failure depending on the wearer, their self-image, and their own private cast of idols. Styling is, in a word, a matter of *taste*, and adapalene is not. Second, there is the brand itself, the product’s most irreducible ingredient. What is a brand but a cluster of associations floating in a relational suspension fluid that determines what it is without any static reference — that is, the very definition of contingency? Chanel gets Margot Robbie; therefore Chanel *is* Margot Robbie. And one day it’ll get someone else and then be something else, and therefore, in a very real sense, it will *do* something else. By the time you arrive at fragrance, contingency is all there is, Chanel is all there is, and Robbie is all there is. Chanel N°5 is not $150 because Coco minmaxed sillage, any more than a Chanel Cruise SS'26 cardigan is $650 because it has arrived at the precise optimal thread count. Dupes of any given Chanel scent are certainly widely available, but even an *identical* replica would not threaten the company in the way that generic semaglutides threaten Novo Nordisk, because the brand is not rooted in the efficacy of active ingredients or the stability of biological need, but instead in the stuff of our subjective, conscious lives: projection, differentiation, self-identification. If Robbie were to serve as brand ambassador for tirzepatide (like Serena Williams), then that would be quite the marketing coup for Eli Lilly, but her cosign would have no eff†ect whatsoever on the digestive system’s glucagon production. Yet her attachment to Chanel — together with the bottle, your memory of that first spritz, *all* the things that have no stable meaning across populations but are the very nature of contingency — *does* determine the experience of the scent, and therefore what it even *does*. And so the sign value of a brand — that wave of the semiotic wand that, by affixing its label to the object, transfigures it into something more desirable than its constituent parts — sticks readily to contingent goods and not-so-readily to technological ones. Of course, skincare brands do all this too. The difference is this: the claims of a retinoid are entirely falsifiable by analyzing the response of the technical system of the skin, whereas the falsification of Fleur de Peau is not only as impossible as it is with any contingent good, but entirely beside the point. Fragrance has no global optima because it is not a problem to be solved in the first place: there is no final answer, no final technique, no universal anything. When one works or doesn’t we can explain exactly why, and with the other, we can’t. Whether Santal 33 works at all is up to you; no one decides if zinc oxide works but God. --- On at least an unconscious level, the world acts as if the difference between technology and contingency were already common knowledge. It’s why you can buy a NARS Orgasm Blush but not La Roche-Posay Orgasm Hyaluronic Acid. Knowing unconsciously is not knowing consciously. The Ordinary understood the difference, and it used it to short the skincare market and set its terms. The Ordinary was built around the sensibility of its software developer founder Brandon Truaxe, who launched the brand in 2016 after realizing how cheap it was to synthesize the chemicals marked up 100x by dominant players in the industry, and hired chemists who specialized in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, not beauty. “I mean, sure, I want the medicine to taste good,” Truaxe told one [interviewer](https://nuvomagazine.com/magazine/summer-2017/brandon-truaxe-founder-deciem?ref=components.news). “But I want the medicine to work.” Against the reigning conventions of the industry at the time, the brand sold direct-to-consumer, with bargain basement prices to match the unvarnished packaging. DECIEM, The Ordinary’s parent company, received its first investment from Estée Lauder a year after its inception, and was fully taken over by the giant for $1.7 billion in 2024. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/ordinary-subway-1.jpeg) If you happened to be in a major cosmopolitan center that year, you probably saw their ads, which read like this: > “This is niacinamide. It evens out your skin tone. Whether it’s endorsed by a famous celebrity an influencer or your friend who uses it. And it can cost you $54 or $6.” Are brands even allowed to talk like this anymore? The entire consumer economy for the past half century had conceded that we live after Edward Bernays; demand is activated through the subconscious. The assumption of the modern era of advertising has been that *everything* needs to find a path to a claim of irreducible contingent value — the product is different but you can’t really say why. This was obviously *Mad Men’*s thesis statement, articulated in its most iconic scene from the first episode. If you’ve watched the show, recall the scene: the tobacco companies are under fire amid the rise of the government’s crackdown on the health claims in their ads. Cigarette makers can no longer argue that filters, low tar, or any other input produces a healthier output. What were the companies to do? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/Screenshot-2026-06-08-at-10.07.07---PM-1.png) sorry wrong scene Don Draper’s epiphany was to move from a technological to a contingent value proposition: “We have six identical companies making six identical products,” he says. “We can say anything we want.” He asks how Lucky Strike is made, and the client rattles off specifics: “grow it, cut it, cure it, toast it, treat it—” “There you go,” says Don, writing “It’s toasted” on his brainstorm blackboard. “But everybody else’s tobacco is toasted.” “No, everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strikes’s is toasted. With six identical products and no way to boast of a technological superiority of one product over the other, there are only two ways to go. One is Draper’s method of projecting the ineffable onto the product, which became the whole industry’s conventional wisdom. The other is a return to the laws of classical economics, which would not have forseen branding narratives, and would have instead forseen an endless price war among cigarette makers. The problem with the classical expectation is that this thought experiment rarely occurs with any fidelity. People don’t know whether the cigarettes are the same; they operate with very imperfect information. The claims for invisible margins of value fill the gap of uncertainty. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/Screenshot-2026-06-08-at-10.08.55---PM.png) The Ordinary’s entire marketing campaign injected information symmetry between buyer and seller, caulking the gap. You thought this space was a competition of contingent value propositions, but it’s not. That leaves only one way to compete: they’ll offer it to you for $54, we’ll give it to you for $6\. Any other feelings you have are a mistake. They’re all toasted. --- Those brands operating in technological space that command higher prices than their inputs and outputs would account for cannot concede this equivalence without their whole identities collapsing. Instead, they try to have it both ways, with technical outputs obfuscated by mysterious inputs. None is more bound to this strategy than La Mer, the very kind of operation The Ordinary is designed to subvert. The basic claims made by the brand’s products are as dryly straightforward as any other technological good; its Crème de la Mer claims to improve skin barrier resilience by 81% within two weeks, and its Night Recovery Concentrate promises a 41% decrease in intensity of post blemish marks after 4 weeks. So far, so technological, until you realize the brand’s name is what it claims as its eponymous hero ingredient, “the sea itself,” which is distilled into its proprietary Miracle Broth™: > *“Crafted with a blend of sustainably harvested Giant Sea Kelp, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients, Miracle Broth undergoes 3 to 4 months of fermentation and exposure to light and sound waves…A formula known by only a few scientists, passed down over time, each new generation of Miracle Broth is infused with drops of the one that came before, creating a timeless link to our original.”* Much has been written before about the woo of La Mer’s mythos and its $390 creams, and to anyone familiar with the brand, it should not surprise them that in our model, it sits at the top of the ladder for those claiming margins of value not captured in their INCI list. So what exactly are those claims? Unlike Augustinus Bader’s patented exosomes, La Mer’s claim is, like any truly contingent good, that neither the inputs nor the outputs can be fully reduced. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/la-mer-in-progress-1-1.jpeg) hero ingredient The signage of its irreducible inputs are everywhere, not just in the sea, but in its marketing copy that the cream is “filled by hand”. Even the idea of the cream’s “timeless link” tries to impart the same heritage value as N°5’s origins that it was made by Coco Chanel’s Rasputin-murdering lover and has retained the same formula since. Does that story change how you experience N°5? It sure changes ours. And knowing that the seaweed in the La Mer cream is somehow linked to the seaweed of a long-ago La Mer cream maybe changes your experience of that product as well. What it doesn’t change is how the technical system of the skin reacts to it. And so the output one is left with is the miraculous sensations of the broth. The Créme de la Mer is a silken but almost artisanal texture that smells not potent but clean, and not just clean, but cleansing; a room in Saint-Tropez where the brasseries are open late and the bread is delicious in a way you just can’t get in the States. The Ordinary’s copper peptide serum is a blue goo that goes on the skin with gluestick consistency and contains notes of aged cum. It contains no fragrance because fragrance adds cost and advances no efficacy. And so The Ordinary's entire anti-aesthetics (plaintext banner ads and greige paste) flaunts the disentanglement of efficacy and experience, while La Mer makes the exact opposite proposition. Like perfume, the experience and signature of La Mer *is* its claim to efficacy (if not the effect in itself). It is an argument made in sensation rather than biochemistry, which is precisely why it cannot be refuted in kind. The Ordinary's entire thesis — that the typical skincare product is one or two active ingredients, with a great many superfluous elements caked on top — is so patently correct that you can use it as a floor to explain the entirety of skincare: for example, why celebrities continue to enter the skincare sector and operate with great success, even in the face of the downward pricing pressure that the brand accelerated. So long as the moisturizer aisle is various mixtures of the same inputs in different bottles and squeeze-tubes, then an adequate brand with a celebrity namesake very well may fly off the shelves. The only thing it will struggle to do, it turns out, is charge a premium. Rhode provides a case in point. If La Mer is the apotheosis of conflating technological ends with contingent claims to value, then Rhode is what happens when you sever them from one another while still leveraging both. First, a question: If Rhode were a physical ingredient, sitting somewhere between the resorcinol and the rosehip oil, how would that ingredient affect the product's cost? This is what we can call the brand premium, which we can calculate by extracting what each brand charges on top of what it would cost, on average, were it not from that particular brand, within the world of Sephora’s pricing. Conversely, we can see whether the brand assigns a discount to its name. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/brand-premium-6.9.26.png) If *any* skincare brand might compel America to pay such a premium on the basis of celebrity alone more than they should for a namesake, then [Ms. Bieber’s would seem a safe bet.](https://www.reddit.com/r/rhodeskin/comments/1m5q5mx/i%5Fjust%5Fgot%5Fan%5Fempty%5Fbox%5Fwith%5Fa%5Fpicture%5Fof%5Fhailey/?ref=components.news) That bet would be a bust. Rhode skims nothing off the top. All the Krispy Kreme pop-ups in the world can’t change the fact that once you decide to sell moisturizer and face cleansers, to announce on product pages that key ingredients include glycerin and vitamin E and not the wild grasses of Andalusia, you announce a product of fungible inputs, which is why Rhode generally falls below the median pricing within the categories it operates in, and within some, is competitive with CeraVe. Parasociality is well and good for generating publicity and sheer sales volume; when you buy Rhode, after all, you *buy Hailey,* and so it's no wonderthat true Beleibers choose glazing milk over equivalently priced Drunk Elephant or Charlotte Tilbury creams*.* Celebrity can shape loyalty, awareness, and consideration, and yet it has not emboldened Rhode to mark up prices against ingredients. So where does Rhode harvest this contingent value-add? In the accessories, we reckon: the Rhode compact mirror ($24), the Rhode Erewhon pink drink ($20), the Rhode phone case ($38). Much has been made of the marketing savvy behind that case (which was so fully a fashion that it vanished by this spring), but seemingly none have noted how it captured surplus spend that would be impossible to capture within the skincare market itself. You may know no more about what actually goesinto a Rhode phone case than you know about how they formulate a Rhode refresh cleanser. What matters is that even if you don't know the first thing about the going rate for bulk PDMS silicone or an injection-moulding and vulcanization facility, you've been on r/skincareaddiction enough to know that you’re a sucker if you're paying more than $5/ounce for shea butter. These are now the operating conditions for anyskincare brand. That Hailey Bieber’s can only extract a premium when selling peptided-up lipstick or diversifying into tchotchkes represents a tacit admission that skincare is not a contingent marketplace — The Ordinary has called the market's bluff on à la carte pricing, putting downward pressure on its competitors, and every skincare brand must decide whether they will reach its customer through their heart or their wallet. Estée Lauder may have glued so many feathers to La Mer that it can flap around up in contingent space, but it's lateral hedges like Rhode's phone case (or Fenty's lingerie, or Glossier's pink hoodie) that will come to play a greater role in skincare as the sector slouches towards commodity pricing. --- La Mer and Rhode have each taken great pains to bring contingency into a technological market; the only difference is that Rhode has not attempted to charge 10x the price for it. But can you blame them for wanting to have it all? Technology without any contingency is Clavicular, all self-improvement rites and sexless sex, the anti-mystique of Patagonia-clad rationalism. Contingency without any technology is a body positivity discourse that collapsed under the weight of Ozempic. The first by itself is nihilism, the other is cope. The challenge for any entity is that once you’ve built a life as one, pivoting to the other is no easier than turning a petrostate into a tourist economy. That The Ordinary's own attempt to launch a makeup line with its Colors project failed points to the difficulty of traversing market spaces when your identity and economics have so firmly rooted you to one in particular. The value propositions of ruthless efficiency don't translate as well when ruthless efficiency contradicts the point of the product. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/06/ordinary-colors.jpeg) gone and mostly forgotten Sooner or later, people are forced to confront which space something belongs in. Entire companies, marketing strategies, brand identities, and cultural turns spin around the belief that no one will ever figure it out. Eventually they do. They get that they’re all toasted, niacinamide is niacinamide, the stripper doesn’t really love you. The converse realization is just as true, usually with more frantic regret — that the dupe isn’t the Birkin, matching on Hinge is not a meet-cute, a coke binge isn’t happiness. Placebo effects are real, they’re just short lived. Eventually circumstances collude to pressurize markets into seeing things for what they are. You saw this happen if you worked at a large company in 2021 and 2022\. One day your firm’s SaaS roster was loaded with dubious enterprise apps at a cumulative toll in the millions of dollars per year. The next day, after the Fed raised rates, those same apps were seen for what they were: useless artifacts of performative enhancement that didn’t increase productivity in the slightest. If they had, the subscriptions would have justified themselves. The smallest macro environmental shift forced an already implicit knowledge to become explicit, and suddenly the apps were offloaded by the hundreds. Here’s our hypothesis: consumers recognize which products belong on which side of the technology-contingency axis when their finances turn. When they downgrade from large luxury to small, they do so on the same side of the axis. People will move from a Bottega bag to Dior lipstick, as the eponymous index suggests, or from La Mer to The Ordinary. But it’s hard to fathom that they move from Bottega to La Mer. Under a tighter budget, the technological nature of the product as skincare is laid bare, and in the long run, it is not subjected to the same evaluative framework as Rick Owens. But the lipstick and the perfume — those actually are, and the market’s gut instinct knows the difference. Discovered with Ctool ### For contours, not trends [Learn more](https://components.news/about/) ### At any cost URL: https://components.news/at-any-cost/ Last updated: 2026-07-03T19:07:23.000Z - New York City is the only major city in the U.S. that hasn't seen a decrease in low-tier housing costs since 2020, according to a Components analysis of the S&P Case-Shiller Index. - It's also the nation's most unaffordable market for renters, as a Components analysis of the American Community Survey and Trulia housing data finds. - NYC isn't the only city with supply constraints, but it *is* uniquely desirable, leading to the consideration that housing solutions may be better addressed from the demand side. --- The “New York or Nowhere” tote seems to have reached peak popularity at a time when fewer people than ever can answer with “New York.” The basics of the city’s housing economics are now so familiar even to non-residents that they hardly bear repeating. Let’s do it anyway: In 2023, the city's vacancy rate [hit 1.4%,](https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vacancy-rate-reaches-historic-low-1-4-percent-demanding-urgent-action-new?ref=components.news) the lowest level since the metric began being tracked in 1965\. The vacancy rate for apartments listed for under $1,100 now sits at 0.39%. Its [Gini coefficient](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/renter-households-cost-burdened-race.html?ref=components.news) continues to creep toward a perfect 1\. As a result, Zohran Mamdani is now mayor. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/01/drowned-subway.jpg) While few markets have actually corrected from the post-pandemic inflation that has come to define American economic life, they have at least plateaued in just about every major city: Miami’s growth peaked in mid-2022 and has slowly stabilized. Remote work and new condos briefly cooled San Francisco's low-end housing market in 2021\. Prices fell in Boston in 2022\. Los Angeles and Seattle roughly followed the national average. The exception is the place whose only alternative is nowhere. The lowest third of New York City home prices have climbed in every six-month period since 2020, according to the Case-Shiller Index. The sharpest growth is concentrated in this end of the market, which represents the only conceivable on-ramp to property ownership in the five boroughs, and where prices haven't actually declined since the 2010s.Prices in New York's low-tier housing market fell by 0.02% during the six-month period ending in January 2016, but for a sustained downturn, you have to look back to the Great Financial Crisis; the lowest third of home prices fell without interuption between 2008 and 2012. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/01/nyc-cs-chart2.png) The regulatory sclerosis, NIMBY obstructionism, and gentrification that breeds unaffordability is not unique to New York, nor is losing population: it’s estimated that 300,000 fewer people live in the city today than in 2020\. Yet unlike San Francisco and Los Angeles, which each lost tens of thousands of residents during the pandemic, the price of homes in New York's housing market apparently *only* goes up, even with the addition of[ more than 100,000 new units](https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/report-24-2025.pdf?ref=components.news). In other words, New York’s housing shortage is considerably less mysterious and less singular than the fact that it is the subject of irrepressible demand. This leads (with gritted teeth) to the conclusion that New York is, indeed, special.That might seem pat were it not for a 2000s-era urbanist discourse that elided New York’s distinctiveness by folding it into a broader cohort of “superstar cities,” places defined by some combination of persistent economic growth and global cultural caché. It turns out places aren’t as interchangeable as per-capita gross metropolitan products would suggest. What's so special anyway? If we take people at their word, it's singular and simple: It's the city where "anything can happen," a mind numbingly banal claim to point out were it not for the conventional wisdom insisting that "anything happening" is the absolute last thing people want. As this wisdom goes, what people want is predictability and certainty, for the same thing to happen again and again, all of us children demanding to be read the Berenstain Bears for the 25th time. This assumption underlies almost the entirety of our cultural economy and its main tech stack, from its dating apps to its streaming services, all of which assume that what we want is for the same thing to happen again and again. ## I ❤️ NY LLC Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. This economy of certainty has customers because people do want this. Specifically, they want what we might call “uncertainty but not too much.” “Anything” can actually happen in an urban space if all your senses are open. You can find a quarter on the ground, see a dog in a terrific outfit, get robbed, miss an obvious opening with a beautiful woman that haunts you for the rest of your life. And yet the very stack that people have embraced — the dating apps, DoorDash, the whole rogues' gallery of lifeless shit — is built from the anti-friction ethos that guides most software built today, designed precisely to ensure that none of that ever happens. So we have a cultural stack of certainty consumed by people who not only choose to live in the most volatile city in the Western Hemisphere, but do so no matter the financial and psychic cost. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/01/dog-in-outfit.jpeg) open yourself to the world and anything can happen If you live there, you see this paradox play out every day in a city that increasingly feels like a special economic zone of short-form video creators and indentured gig workers delivering burritos to people rarely daring to step outside to navigate the canals between flagship stores and LLC-owned pied-à-terres. We are not the first to wonder why one would complete the Battle Royale necessary to move to New York for the privilege of ordering at home when, in all likelihood, your job offers you the opportunity to work from home, which you can do from anywhere and most likely do in your city apartment. Here’s one uncynical hypothesis: People choose certainty on a quotidian basis, but on a larger scale they don’t really want it. People constantly choose things they don’t actually want on smaller units of time, and the things they actually want on larger units of time. Think of things done “in the moment”: committing murder, saying something cruel, smoking meth. No one spends two months planning to use meth or slight their lover, and if they spend months planning murder, that’s a specific *mens rea* with its own sentencing guidelines. So on a larger scale of value assessment, people are actually choosing the diametric opposite of our dominant cultural norm. While San Francisco has tech, Miami has tech and thongs, and Seattle has tech and redwoods, however much Jared Kushner and Bluetooth headphones have conspired to corrode it, New York still has more gestalt than pretty much anywhere else, or at least a lingering mythos of it. If it must be a company town, it is at least a company town for every company. And on that foundation, unexpected stuff — professional, romantic, experiential, and so on — happens. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/01/nyc-rental-chart.png) That unexpected stuff may happen way less than it used to, but still happens more frequently than in any other city stateside. And in this way, New York does (or did) what all generalist systems do — it puts everything in proximity to everything else, producing a unitary whole that works better than any of those things in isolation. This defines all the best and most functional systems compared to their alternatives, from networks to contemporary AI models to human development itself. When presented with a system of everything everywhere all at once, people choose it, and in choosing it, assign value to it. And the value people have assigned to the uncertainty and generalism either presently or imaginatively manifest in New York has proven to be inflexible in ways that demand for a conventional "superstar" metro area has not. Whether all this is still extant in a city wreaked by a previously unimaginable asociality doesn’t really matter; the belief alone that it is a city of gestalt is enough to keep the prices high. The supply-side explanations for the city’s housing crisis are in every city in the country; the demand-side explanations are not. One can’t fully make sense of the city's only-goes-up housing market, and the psychological trials its residents withstand to endure it, without pricing this in. At least on paper, Mamdani is committed to the former, promising to construct affordable housing and expand rent protections. These measures may or may not depress home prices, given that New York's market has proven immune to the factors that cooled growth elsewhere, but should at least provide some relief to [the third of low-income New Yorkers putting more than half of their paychecks towards rent.](https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys-rental-housing-market/?ref=components.news) In effect, though, he may inadvertently prevail more with demand-side solutions. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2026/01/living-in-an-unreal-world.png) Or maybe Mamdani’s greatest achievement in turning the tide on the city’s housing crisis will turn out to be the simple act of being himself: a Muslim Democratic Socialist stoking the full spectrum of socioeconomic fears harbored by the city’s most moneyed and most detached class. Already, X is alight with goodbye-to-all-that posts from people skipping town in order to avoid a 2% marginal tax increase. We first glimpsed this possibility in August, when a serial founder-turned-investor told one of us, “Mamdani scares the shit out of me.” It’s worth pointing out that this person did not live in New York. It’s certainly possible Mamdani turns out to be a terrible mayor, as mayors almost always are. But he has already accomplished the once impossible demand-side housing challenge: for a certain type of pseudoresident, he has turned “New York or Nowhere” into “Anywhere but New York.” ### There is inflation in the world but not in this room URL: https://components.news/there-is-inflation-in-the-world-but-not-in-this-room/ Last updated: 2026-06-24T18:56:33.000Z ## Summary - The average ticket for a paid event on Resident Advisor fell about 30% from post-pandemic highs in opposition to broader inflationary trends, a Components analysis finds. - Electronic music events on RA are increasingly likely to charge no cover, and to be held outside of NYC, LA, Chicago, or Miami. - This all suggests that a recent renewal of interest in dance music has done more to inspire newcomers and DIY promoters than it has to encourage price hikes or corporate takeovers. --- When dance music commentators are not writing about the music—and it seems they would take *any* excuse notto write about the music—they tend to be eulogizing it. Either 1) no one is dancing because everyone is on their phones, 2) no one is dancing because everyone is a DJ, or 3) no one is dancing because they're too busy theorizing about dancing. But if there is one unifying fear, it is that capital has turned nightlife into yet another asset under management. Such concerns are nothing new,Between alcopop guerilla marketing and PlayStation chillout rooms, corporate sponsorship was a hallmark of the UK's turn-of-the-millenium boom years. The Guardian could declare that clubbing had "become the realm of huge multinational corporations and sponsorship deals" back in 2004\. By the 2010s, EDC and EDM had hit their stride stateside… and on and on. but private equity firm KKR's incursion into clubland has brought institutional capital back to the forefront of dance music discourse. Op-eds and IG reels alike now cast dance music as the casualty of a historical progression that began with revolutionary acts in the Rust Belt and ended with slackjawed matcha raves in Hudson Yards. Allbirds stamping on a human face, forever. It’s easy to buy into this resignation. Even the editor of Resident Advisor recently [argued](https://ra.co/features/4469?ref=components.news) (convincingly!) that mainstream nightlife is in a retrograde cultural tailspin. But if total corporate capture were a given, it would presumably play out the same way it does everywhere else: with a hike in prices. Instead, the average cost of U.S. paid tickets on Resident Advisor has trended *downward* over the last four years, falling about 30% from June 2021\. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/11/club-inflation-2.png) Cover charges are an incomplete measure for the cost of clubbing, as anyone with a vodka tonic in hand can tell you. Even so, getting past the average bouncer has gotten cheaper. This is both a relief, and a reminder that nightlife has yet to be defined by Blackstone-bankrolled mainstages and VIP pricing tiers. A world where more people can party for less money does not sound like such a bad thing. That *any* experience of *any* kind has gotten less expensive—or even just not gotten more expensive—is exceptional at a time where the cost of nearly every conceivable good and service feels like it has gone vertical. ## Inflation-free forever Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. There are pessimistic interpretations one can bring to this: it could very well follow from downward pressure on venue owners doing anything they can to bring people in the door. (Venues traditionally have the opportunity to recoup their losses at the door over at the bar, but a series of[ club closures](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/realestate/brooklyn-closures-nightlife.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.-E4.TGy6.wbNsVTiyTr8g&smid=re-nytimes&ref=components.news) indicates that it's hard to balance the books—not least because if Paragon doubled their prices like Cal-Maine Foods, Mondelēz, or the median landlord, they'd be crucified for it.) Still, something particular is happening at dance clubs. After all, cinemas face the same headwinds, and have responded by jacking up the price of admission at the same rates as the rest of the U.S. economy. In its simplest form, then, the difference is that your typical promoter has no investors to answer to, and motives beyond dynamic pricing or profit maximization—two things you can’t say about your local Regal Cinema. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/11/yasmin-and-the-french-woman.jpeg) Much of pessimistic club commentary seems to imply that every raver works at an investment bank and loves cocaine. Credit: HBO/BBC If there’s anywhere a price hike would be expected, it should be New York, which conventional wisdom holds is ground zero not only for bottle service and business techno, but for corporate pop-ups and superclubs financed by private equity. Whatever the moral or cultural harm of a Smirnoff pop-up in the outer boroughs may be, its monetary impact on the average raver Much of the popular writing I’ve seen on nightlife focuses (sometimes in hazy terms) on gentrification inside clubs. A less expensive average ticket price complicates that story, but doesn't speak to how clubs can drive gentrification on the outside, or how real estate valuations figure into that picture; what's good for ravers may not be good for their neighbors. seems limited: event prices in NYC are lower than they were in 2021, and have held steady over the past three years. Even if KKR is deadset on ROI, one is less likely to be flying out to Sónar or getting guestlisted for Boiler Room than to be attending a local event. And those have gradually grown more common: 2024 was the first year of the decade where there were more events outside of NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami than in them. There are as many definitions of a healthy underground as there are DJs, and there are more DJs every day, but a world with psytrance in Pittsburgh and liquid drum n' bass in Albuquerque must count for something. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/11/free-and-big4-1.png) More striking still is that free RA events have tripled in frequency over the last four years.This is true both of events explicitly designated as "free" on RA (which still represent a relatively small share of listings) and those without price data (which outnumber both "paid" and "free" events). Some portion of this may be made up by dive bar vinyl nights and K-Pop Demon Hunters karaoke events, sure. But this also points to a long tail of ravers, casuals, and true believers who cannot (or will not) ask or pay $40 at the door, and who, accordingly, make poor targets for corporate takeovers. The boycotts that were organized against KKR/Superstruct are one good reason not to catastrophize about the state of nightlife. That financial gatekeeping has not come to define the scene is another. Cultural critics often can't help but proclaim doom from all angles. Sometimes things really are as bad as they say. As far as the music industry goes as a whole, it's certainly not all in their heads: Just about every other sector of it has been scrapped for parts, from catalogue purchases and sync deals all the way down to advertorials and sponcon. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/11/a1960744180_10.jpg) With his 2006 LP **The Death of Rave,* Leyland Kirby took a bad night at Berghain as evidence for the end of an entire subculture: "Grim and boring beats, endlessly pounding to an audience who felt they were part of an experience but who lacked cohesion and energy. For me personally something had died." But other times, it's simply because they can't help it, because doom is the genre, because a personal melancholy is projected out towards everything that exists. In 2011, Mark Fisher's name was synonymous with critical acumen. In 2025, it can evoke a subtle roll of the eyes, and maybe just did. For all his virtues, Fisher told us that the entirety of musical creativity died circa 1993 and that everything that has ever followed is a mere loop of nostalgic regurgitation. This claim inspired a good portion of a generation of critics to say the same thing despite it being so obviously, demonstrably wrong, and it's perhaps why he and the dialogue he inspired now seem so distant. There's no reason to believe we won't look back on every death-of-rave commentator in the same way; like all apocalypse preachers, it's hard to keep listening when you wake up the next morning and realize Judgment Day never came. So long as Spotify and Live Nation exist, there will be myriad opportunities to pen missives about total corporate dominion over independent youth culture. But the dismal economics of streaming or mainstage dynamic pricing don't have to follow you to the dancefloor. ### Put the money in the bag URL: https://components.news/put-the-money-in-the-bag/ Last updated: 2026-07-06T15:17:27.000Z ## Summary**:** - Online resale startups created new markets for old clothes. But on Vestiaire Collective, purses, watches, and jewelry are most likely to sell. - These categories represent about 16% of listings on the platform, but brought in 42% of revenue between March and September 2025, a Components analysis finds. - That raises new questions about whether the broader sector can deliver on its environmentalist promises (or its valuations). --- Online resale markets were built on the conviction that most things have value. They have yet to prove that most things are in demand. Consider clothing: Even at steep discounts or in “Like New” condition, the average Rag & Bone jacket or Naked & Famous jeans go unsold. Purses are different. They’re the best-selling category on the luxury resale platform Vestiaire Collective, representing 11% of listings but a fifth of all revenue between March and September 2025—more than dresses, boots, sweaters, jeans and heels put together. Like other accessories, they’re not just more likely to sell than shirts or skirts, but to sell for a higher price, faster. That is good news for anyone with a Longchamp to flip. For “recommerce” platforms, it’s a mixed bag. Grailed, Thredup, Depop, The RealReal, Poshmark, Vinted, and Vestiaire Collective have spent the past decade making essentially identical pitches to investors (that they could capture a sliver of the billions that shoppers spend on clothing each year) and to sellers (that the neglected nylon button-up in their closet could net a few bucks). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/10/61349.jpg) Among Nicolas de Larmessin II's **Les costumes grotesques*: the secondhand clothes-seller (**fripier).* But on Vestiaire, accessories sell best. Rings, bracelets, necklaces, and earrings each make up less than 1% of total listings, but combined, account for 15% of all revenue. These categories don't just command higher prices, but are more likely to sell at all, making them among the most profitable categories. If you couldn’t get mugged for it or use it to pay a bribe, it's less likely to find a home. There is no shortage of explanations for shoppers’ skepticism toward secondhand shirts or jeans. What is harder to explain is what the future of clothing resale looks like if the sector’s best-performing categories succeed for all the reasons that they’re not really clothes at all. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/10/Vestaire-Collective-1.png) The intuitive explanation is that rings, purses, and watches are less intimate. A handbag has many uses—you can festoon it with Labubus or carry a Pomeranian—but each takes place at arm’s length. Clothes, conversely, are broken in or worn out. By the same token, accessories are one-size-fits-all. A secondhand Neverfull can be slung on any shoulder, a vintage Grand Seiko can be fastened on any wrist. Neither will shrink in the wash or stretch with wear—which is helpful if a shopper intends to “buy it for life,” but even more helpful if he has resale value in the back of his mind. ## Fits the body type of any inbox Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Vestiaire’s best-sellers have some overlap with duty-free kiosks and pawn shops, but the truest counterpart is Canal Street. Watches, purses, and rings sell well on both markets because they are standardized goods with high margins, recognized by buyers who are unwilling to pay retail prices. Importing a superfake may be more work than dropping off a bag at UPS, but for counterfeiters and resellers, the category merits the effort. ![](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_1600,h_1600,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/artlogicstorage/vsf/images/view/42d5cbeac7fe7a473e7d291ea7ec665dj/varioussmallfires-liz-magic-laser-mine-2009.jpg) In "Mine" (2009), Liz Magic Laser "[worked with a surgeon to direct the da Vinci Surgical System robot to perform a series of surgical maneuvers on her purse](https://www.lizmagiclaser.com/mine/?ref=components.news)." High margins are [one reason that fashion houses produce purses in the first place](https://www.ft.com/content/0ac15868-69ac-4e37-bbef-e3c5d40e8f55?ref=components.news). It is also the underlying principle that led the resale platforms (for all their *FernGully*ish language) to converge on being *luxury* markets rather than *clothing* markets. From processing fees to finders’ fees, a “designer” price point means that there's simply more cash to peel off each transaction. Most of these platforms ([Vestiaire included](https://faq.vestiairecollective.com/hc/en-us/articles/10821747262353-Seller-Brands-We-Don-t-Accept?ref=components.news)) have banned fast fashion brands from their platform in order to maintain that standard. However intently one holds The RealReal or Vinted to their “circular economy” promises, no one could fault them for taking steps to exclude threadbare sweaters or craquelured Gildan graphic tees from sale. No one wants to pay shipping & handling for chintzy shit. What is surprising, rather, is that even these painstaking efforts to maintain a curated selection at a luxury price point mostly can‘t keep shoppers from perceiving clothing as perishable*.* Purses make this clear: While watches, rings, and bracelets are among Vestiaire’s most expensive categories per unit, the median purse is just $34 more expensive than the median dress (at a modest $173), and yet twice as likely to sell. So no matter how much *Vogue* enjoys advising readers that Savette's $1900 Tondo hobo bag and Bottega Veneta's $5,500 Andiamo are [the purses with “the highest resale value,](https://www.vogue.com/article/bags-with-the-best-resale-value?ref=components.news)” handbags outperform clothing not because they are ultraluxury "investment pieces" stitched by hand and built to last, but because shoppers perceive them as a different type of good at every price point. A higher price floor may keep fast fashion from gumming up the works, but is unlikely to close the gap between how we view clothes and how we view accessories. This is, again, a mixed bag. Online shoppers’ enthusiasm towards secondhand purses and watches suggests they are convinced by Vestiaire’s authentication measures (no mean feat). Vestiaire’s decision to not warehouse its stock also means it will at least avoid being saddled with metric tons of unsold sneakers and sundresses. But in the long run, shoppers’ reluctance to spend on secondhand clothes will remain a challenge for these platforms, whether or not the markets for luxury goods andstartup funding continue to cool. The sector's struggles aren't new: Poshmark went public and was [yanked back to private ownership within two years](https://wwd.com/business-news/financial/poshmark-naver-1-2-billion-buyout-ipo-manish-chandra-1235377621/?ref=components.news), The RealReal's stock price has only recently rebounded from a years-long slide, and four years on from its series F round, Vestiaire is still on its winding path towards a never-quite-there IPO. Last year, the platform took to the unusual move of [crowdfunding from users](http://google.com/search?q=vestiaire+crowdfunding&oq=vestiaire+crowd&gs%5Flcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCAgAEEUYJxg7MggIABBFGCcYOzIGCAEQRRg5MgoIAhAAGAoYFhgeMggIAxAAGBYYHjIICAQQABgWGB4yDQgFEAAYhgMYgAQYigUyDQgGEAAYhgMYgAQYigUyCggHEAAYgAQYogQyCggIEAAYgAQYogQyCggJEAAYgAQYogTSAQgyODEyajBqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&ref=components.news), and just two weeks ago, founder and CEO Maximilian Bittner was [ousted in a C-suite reshuffling](https://puck.news/what-happened-to-vestiaire-collective/?ref=components.news). The potential of clothing resale is clear in an era of extravagant waste and exorbitant pricing. But [some skepticism is warranted](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainability/articles/10.3389/frsus.2025.1499273/full?ref=components.news) about whether these startups will succeed in turning a profit—let alone “democratizing fashion” or eliminating [those Salvation Army donation-box bleachfields—](https://www.wired.com/story/fashion-disposal-environment/?ref=components.news)so long as the qualities that make its bestsellers perfect for resale are the same qualities that make them least representative of their broader inventory mix. Of course, purses carry their own histories, no matter how well they sell secondhand. Any given handbag is a register of receipts and lipstick and loose metrocards, enough DNA and detritus from which to reconstruct a life from. Many a style reporter has tried, as in a noted 2006 profile of Mary-Kate Olsen in *W Magazine*, which pries into her Le City bag, finding it “dingy, covered with stains, pen marks, and even a chewed-up piece of gum,” and codifying a sort of louche glamour that has become *de rigeur*. But two decades on, we’re still more willing to put up with the paraphernalia of a stranger's life than walk a mile in their shoes. ### Why It Won't Stop URL: https://components.news/why-it-wont-stop-campaign-text-messages/ Last updated: 2025-10-13T20:40:13.000Z ## Summary - Individual, non-PAC contributions to congressional candidates are now more likely to come from donors who live outside the candidate’s state than from in-state residents, at a roughly 2:1 ratio, a Components analysis finds. - This balance was tipped in 2016 and the trend has accelerated since. - The primacy of out-of-state gifts has been facilitated by the rise of ActBlue and WinRed, which in the 2024 election processed about 54% of all campaign contributions --- During an election, you will receive dozens of text messages from political candidates soliciting a campaign contribution. In 2022 alone, [15 billion](https://www.nbcchicago.com/consumer/illinois-among-the-most-targeted-states-for-political-text-messages-heres-what-you-can-do/3589911/?ref=components.news) political text messages were sent — meaning the average phone received 50 of them. Your area code and actual place of residence has little bearing on which candidates will appeal for a contribution. Live in California with a New Mexico area code? Meet “Sarah Trone Garriott: a mom, minister, and Democratic State Senator running for Congress to fight for Iowa families and take on the broken politics in DC.” These out-of-the-ActBlue solicitations are tailored to take advantage of the growing share of donations to congressional candidates that come from outside the state they’re actually running in. An early sign of the shift came in 2019, when the retired Marine colonel Amy McGrath released an ad online to announce her intention to seize one of Kentucky’s Senate seats from Mitch McConnell. ## We'll never ever text you. Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. In the 24 hours after McGrath’s ad went online, her Senate campaign received [$2.4 million](https://www.gq.com/story/mitch-mcconnell-senate-opponent-amy-mcgrath?ref=components.news) in donations. Over the next year and a half, her campaign would raise almost $100 million dollars on the way to an absolute drubbing by McConnell, all that money helping her only outpace Joe Biden’s performance in the state by about 40,000 votes. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/10/data-src-image-4d67bfaa-e72f-422f-a8c3-bc209618dde0.png) **his superpower was separating democrats from dollar bills* McGrath has hardly been the only longshot candidate to raise such an extraordinary sum of money. Two years later, Democrat Jamie Harrison raised $57 million in one quarter as he sought to unseat South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham — a race that also ended in a predictable blowout loss. Candidates posting these eye-popping totals for congressional campaigns they have little hope of winning is indicative of the nationalization of the electorate, with partisans eager to throw money at anyone who promises to take down a partisan bogeymen — McConnell, Ted Cruz, or Lauren Boebert on one side, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren on the other. In the George W. Bush era, someone running for the House or Senate might expect to receive one dollar from an out-of-state donor for every three they raised in-state. Now, that ratio has inverted, with overall out-of-state contributions in 2022 nearly doubling what candidates could raise in-state. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/10/In-state-vs-Out-of-state-1.png) In many ways, the nationalization of the electorate follows the same arc of placelessness as all other facets of 21st Century life. If the average American is now more familiar with Marjorie Taylor Greene or Ilhan Omar than they are the people running their city or county government, it’s for the same reason they’re not familiar with much of *anything* in actual proximity to them anymore. But regardless of how much weight one chooses to put on any particular we-live-in-a-society critique, the growing propensity of donors to support candidates who live in different states appears to be a lagging indicator of that shift. While the ratio of in-state to out-of-state spending was relatively stable from 1998 to 2012, it began changing as soon as the ActBlue payment processing platform was adopted by Democratic candidates all over the country. Along with its Republican counterpart WinRed, the two platforms accounted for 53.9% of all campaign contributions in the 2024 election. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/10/ActBlue-vs-WinRed-5-1.png) ActBlue created a standardized way for liberal donors to support candidates, storing not only their payment information but the demographic disclosures required of any political donor. Once you had given to one Democratic candidate through the platform, it was a snap to give to another one, regardless of location. The extensive lists of individual donors generated by ActBlue have consequently become like collectibles to campaigns, with candidates purchasing lists of donors from each other until practically every campaign has practically every donor’s information. During the 2018 election cycle, a single donor named Sibyll Barlow made 4,877 gifts using the platform. While Barlow lived in Concord, a wealthy suburb of Boston, she told reporters from the Center on Public Integrity that practically all her donations had been directed out of state. Another ActBlue “super user” from California named William Nottingham said, “I can’t get in the car and drive to Kentucky and campaign for someone like Amy McGrath, but I can sure send her a couple of bucks now and then.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/10/data-src-image-bc8601e3-fcbf-468d-a74b-9c6c37161f5e-1-1.jpeg) **usually recommends him as a contact* Recognizing that ActBlue had created a massive grassroots fundraising gap between Democrats and Republicans, the GOP launched WinRed in 2019\. Over the next year and a half, the platform processed [$1.2 billion](https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-1da3-d951-a77f-7dffcbaf0000&ref=components.news) in donations to conservative candidates, a veritable West Texas gusher of political cash that the Republican rank-and-file had been eagerly waiting for an opportunity to spread around the country. Once fully operational for their respective political partisans, WinRed and ActBlue were able to process 60 percent of all gifts in the 2020 election cycle, setting a record for the election where the highest proportion of out-of-state money was raised. In the years since, congressional candidates in hopeless races have become fond of touting their fundraising numbers, even as those windfalls represent little beyond rancor at their opponent. Democrat Adam Frish garnered national attention for his race against Lauren Boebert in 2023 when his campaign announced it had tripled her fundraising haul in one quarter; Republican Steve Garvey got a good news cycle out of his having outraised Adam Schiff by over a $1 million in their California Senate race.There’s some [evidence](http://chriswarshaw.com/papers/advertising.pdf?ref=components.news) that spending big on political advertising has more of an effect on determining the winner of down-ballot races than it does presidential elections. Still, the sheer quantity of money spent matters far less than the way that money is spent, and on whose behalf. While a new candidate for a local office can get a huge return on investment on their advertising if their main goal is simply introducing themselves to voters, it’s hard to imagine that was a major factor for a retired professional athlete like Garvey in his largely symbolic gubernatorial campaign. (Both lost). The same process is unfolding ahead of the 2026 midterms: this past summer, the retired Marine Corps sergeant challenging Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia proclaimed that his campaign had outraised the incumbent in the month of June. Wishful thinking often motivates out-of-state giving, but it is also a useful barometer of grassroots enthusiasm. Take New York City’s mayoral race: more than half the $1 million [Zohran Mamdani](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/zohran-mamdani-campaign-rakes-1m-171418448.html?ref=components.news) raised in a thirty day period came from outside the five boroughs, with most of that haul coming from small gifts — only one out of every eight donors actually lived in New York. The ability of a leading candidate for a mayoral office (albeit one that governs a population larger than most states) to garner so much support from people who will never be his constituents is indicative of the desperate desire of so many Democrats to support a candidate — any candidate — who seems capable of pushing their party out of its stultifying routine. ActBlue and WinRed provide a tangible way for partisans across the country to converge on a single race and say, “More of this, please.” ### The Desire Distribution URL: https://components.news/the-desire-distribution/ Last updated: 2025-12-08T20:01:03.000Z ## Summary - A Components analysis estimates that about $600 million will be spent on Substack subscriptions this year. - 71% of the money passing through Substack was spent on publications with fewer than 100,000 subscribers — a reversal of the fat-tail revenue distributions that have defined the platform age. - This reversal stems from Substack’s reintroduction of money, rather than attention, as the basic unit of exchange, creating a market of need and desire particularized to groups rather than a broadly applicable media market appealing to biological reflexes. --- Those who either lived through the 2000s or have graced a used bookstore will likely recall *The Long Tail*, published in 2006 by then-*Wired* editor Chris Anderson amid the opening shots of the platform age. Anderson prophesied an imminently sanguine future of cultural dynamism unleashed by new mass distribution channels that rendered physical constraints all but meaningless. Whereas Tower Records and Barnes & Noble had to contend with limited shelf space and find the lowest common denominators of their various markets, iTunes and Amazon were unbound by the same limitations. Without the contingencies of physical stores, they could sell *everything*, and Anderson predicted that’s just what they would do. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/longtail.jpg) available at every used bookstore near you. Credit: Flicker/Witer To the extent people reference *The Long Tail* anymore, it’s typically to make a point of how wrong it turned out to be. On [Spotify](https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/top-1-percent-streaming-1055005/?ref=components.news), 90% of streams go to the top 1% of artists. One [analyst](https://alanspicer.com/what-percentage-of-youtubers-make-money/?ref=components.news) estimated that only 0.25% of YouTube creators actually earn any money. The platforms offer everything, but people consume very little of what’s actually there. “It never happened. More to the point, it was *never* going to happen because the story was a fairy tale,” the music writer Ted Gioia [wrote](https://www.honest-broker.com/p/where-did-the-long-tail-go?ref=components.news) in a retrospective of the book. Of course the future didn’t work out as a *Wired* editor planned. What has? But Anderson’s thesis rested on a subtle detail whose disappearance was difficult to predict: it assumed money would actually change hands between buyer and seller, that cultural economics would follow the basic transactional nature it had since transactions began. What he didn’t forsee was the intricate latticework of licensing deals and platform economics that froze that exchange and enabled a form of infinite, virtually free, always-on consumption, as well as how that consumption would be led by the mutually denigrating factors of adtech and recommendation systems to generate 10 gigatons daily of the ur-slop AI is now trained to reproduce. In other words, Anderson didn’t forsee the preconditions of the attention economy, whose existence has become such a basic fact of life that it has until recently become difficult to fathom the world without it.Easier to imagine the end of the world etc. In the attention economy, we pay little to no money, and instead engage in transactions of engagement, viewership, streams, and so on, with the the second-order effects of increasing ad revenue and/or continuing a habituation to a platform whose subscription fee is just small enough for us to not really notice. And as it turns out, what we pay attention to is fairly predictable. In the case of active attention, these are loud things, sexual things, shocking things, provocative things, annoying things, outrageous things. In the case of passive attention, these are things we can mostly ignore that hit some sweet spot of palatability. Think MrBeast and Jake Paul in the former and Drake post-More Life in the latter. In both cases, by removing a direct exchange of money from the transaction between buyer and seller, a product moves from needing to be good enough to actually be worth paying for to just being either good enough to spend a moment absorbing or not so bad that you turn it off. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/mrbest.png) winning formula. Credit: MrBeast At bottom, this is because the things that merely garner attention have to do little more than activate a set of biological reflexes that are mostly shared from person to person. And since what grabs attention is fairly uniform across a population, what works for one individual is more likely to work for another person at scale. For example, imagine that, while reading this, you hear a bomb go off. Does it get your attention? Does it get the attention of everyone else in the room? It’s worth considering why there's only one answer to this, and it’s because the things that garner attention are mostly impersonal — regardless of any imaginable detail that constitutes the individuals in the room, everyone will stop and pay attention to the sound of the bomb. If you have a migraine, it’s all you can pay attention to, and you don’t have much choice in the matter, regardless of who you are. The behavioral psychologists first hired by Facebook and then hired pretty much everywhere else to maximize engagement all operate from the same man-as-biological-machine premise, that what increases engagement — what heightens and sustains attention — is a set of biological and neurological properties that apply to one person as much as another. It’s why notification icons are red, why users are predictably fed certain irresistibly activating content, and why whatever app you’re using is designed precisely as it is. If all that matters is grabbing the user’s attention, however fleetingly, then the lowest-common-denominator approach will always prevail. ## But pay attention to us Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. But would you pay for that bomb to go off? Or for a 30-second video of a street fight in Baltimore? Or for the individual track of whatever ignorable ambient music is playing in the background? Probably not, because what simply captures your attention is not sufficient to be the thing you actually want. --- One might expect Substack to continue on the same trajectory as what has so far preceded it. On paper, it almost seems like it should. Its $190 million in funding, which puts the company at a $1.1 billion valuation, comes from some of the same VCs behind the biggest platforms of the attention economy. Its role in publishing is now so dominant that it has germinated its own ecosystem of startups, like *The Ankler*, which last raised $1.5 million at a $20 million valuation. The pending acquisition by Larry Ellison’s kid of its most inescapable success story, *The Free Press*, implies a revenue distribution whose money concentrates at the very tip. But unlike most platforms, Substack has not ended up replicating the gross imbalances of revenue. It has reversed them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/10/Substack-revenue-curve.png) Publications with at least 500,000 followersSubscriber numbers and revenue were calculated by sampling actual public subscriber info and a sample of a publication’s normal and founder-level subscriber rates and scaling that based on a publication’s size, not simply by applying blanket assumptions of how many people pay for Substacks overall. make up only 7.6% of the roughly $600 million we estimate was spent on the platform in July on an annualized basis. The bulk of that revenue comes from much smaller writers. More than 36% of the platform’s revenue comes from writers with 10,000 to 50,000 followers, who typically make anywhere from roughly $25,000 to $125,000\. 71% of the platform’s revenue comes from publications with fewer than 100,000 followers. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/11/Substack-revenue-range.png) Why would a platform built on users paying for products construct a negative image revenue curve relative to other platforms? Because unlike what merely commands our attention, what we purchase is on some level particular to the individual.Also I believe the philosopher John Dewey would see a distinction here between impulse and impulsion, with impulse/attention as mere reflex, and desire/need as a drive towards consummation. A purchase — for a barrel of petroleum, a shitcoin, a donation to a political candidate, a Labubu, or a copy of *Madame Bovary* — is a belief in that thing’s necessity, however small, either as a means to an end or as an end in and of itself. Sometimes that necessity is nefarious, sometimes it’s not, but it always begins with a desire that the purchase, directly or otherwise, seeks to fulfill. These needs and desires follow the contours of groups and individuals and their own positions in the world in a way the universal dynamics of attention can’t. A private equity analyst needs information that a nurse doesn’t. A gamer wants to play *Ghostwire: Tokyo*, a quilter wants to make a quilt, a NASCAR driver cares about tires and stuff, and to you, your lover is the most beautiful person in the world. Attention has few optima, desire has many. A bomb going off means the same thing to me as my neighbor, but a screen of bond yields means essentially nothing to me and everything to a bond trader. All of them possess value from the point of the valuer, and contained in all things of value, one way or another, is the promise, immediate or downstream, of more richly being in the world. It’s why a well lit apartment costs more than a poorly lit one, why the promise of a life clad in Brunello Cucinelli in the Hamptons drives someone to go all in on a memestock, why at least many of us still spend money on the full experience of cinema instead of streaming on an iPad, and why we read things that, however slightly, transfigure the world into something meaningful from one’s particular vantage. And so to buy anything,People of course pay for things like Spotify, but more as a low-cost utility than as some specific object of desire. including a Substack subscription, is to make an affirmative claim on a thing’s ability to somehow do that. Think of a Substack you subscribe to. Maybe you don’t subscribe to any. Okay, I’ll go: I subscribe to Spoils of War, a chronicle of the military-industrial complex by its sharpest observer, Harper’s Washington editor Andrew Cockburn. Cockburn’s newsletter is, for my money, the best documentation we have on how American tax dollars are recreationally lit on fire towards no betterment of national security. And when you finally grasp that the point of American war is not to win, but simply to keep fighting, as well as why forever war is the end goal to the point of compromising every other national interest, and when you understand the extent and mechanisms through which that happens, America makes much more sense. Everything in your environment — the destitute landscape of the country, the crumbling infrastructure, the pundits shrieking about Iran, the feast-or-famine social order — emanates significance that it would not have had otherwise. In other words, the environment becomes richer, deeper, more meaningful, more navigable. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/f35.jpg) Switzerland was recently pressured into spending $7.4 billion on 36 Lockheed Martin F-35s, which it will almost certainly never use and that Cockburn has argued largely wouldn’t work even if they tried to. Credit: US Air Force The same basic value proposition is at play even in the most seemingly utilitarian cases. Substack has plenty of stock picking newsletters. I have no idea what their track records are, and even if they’re not good, the promise they hold is still basically the same as the promise of Cockburn’s newsletter: a way to make a landscape of objects intelligible that would otherwise be unintelligible, and therefore, a compass to navigate through them towards some end. These needs are as diverse as the collective varieties of people and groups, and, as Components has argued about [Bandcamp](https://components.news/bandcamp-the-chaos-bazaar/), Substack, whether cofounder Hamish McKenzie grasps this or not, is built on capturing the complexity of desires instead of the simplicity of attention, using relatively basic technology. That Substack is quickly vaulting towards a billion dollars passing through its platform in the next couple years while Vice navigates bankruptcy court, BuzzFeed sits inches away from becoming a penny stock, and every other media outlet that tried to chase traffic by following the rules set by the attention engineers of the platforms they circulated within, is, beneath the failures of the individual companies and the caprice of changes to Google’s algorithm,The perennial scapegoat of every media company’s problems. the endgame of a media economy where simple transactions in service of needs vanish. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/Screenshot-2025-09-25-at-1.42.51---AM.png) as of this writing, buzzfeed stock sits at about $1.30\. [https://www.theawl.com/2015/03/i-hate-myself-because-i-dont-work-for-buzzfeed/](https://www.theawl.com/2015/03/i-hate-myself-because-i-dont-work-for-buzzfeed/?ref=components.news) So if Substack’s success is any indication, markets only work — and the long tail only finally appears — when money resumes its primacy and displaces second-order, intangible exchanges. “My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like ‘recognition’ and ‘credit’ warp them,Maybe the most striking about the article by the person who wanted to die because they didn’t write for BuzzFeed is how those participating in the attention economy internalize the need for that attention on a personal level. creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry,” Nassim Taleb writes in Antifragile. “Commerce, business, Levantine souks (though not large-scale markets and corporations) are activities and places that bring out the best in people, making most of them forgiving, honest, loving, trusting, and open-minded. As a member of the Christian minority in the Near East, I can vouch that commerce, particularly small commerce, is the door to tolerance—the only door, in my opinion, to any form of tolerance.” Perhaps Taleb is slightly overstating things. But the basic assertion that money clarifies, that markets should serve the needs and desires of buyers and sellers, and that markets without money fail to do this, is difficult to refute after more than a decade of its absence. A dying media industry in New York is trying to refute it anyway, chasing algorithms and blaming them when things don’t work out. In an interview, McKenzie [gave](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/digital-media-industry-press-journalism-future.html?ref=components.news) much of the industry five more years before it finally collapses. They should cherish every day they have left. ### Building Heideggerian AI URL: https://components.news/building-heideggerian-ai/ Last updated: 2026-06-11T01:43:34.000Z “...what is essential — what causes one to tremble with fear and delight.” Georges Bataille, *The Accursed Share* --- In 1972, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus published a broadside against the popular consensus on artificial intelligence, and in doing so, helped construct the philosophical foundations of deep learning. At the time that [*What Computers Can’t Do*](https://monoskop.org/images/c/ce/Dreyfus%5FHubert%5FWhat%5FComputers%5FCant%5FDo%5FA%5FCritique%5Fof%5FArtificial%5FReason.pdf?ref=components.news) came out, progress in artificial intelligence was at an impasse, a period now known as the “AI winter.” Researchers were able to program machines to perform well on small tasks, but those models failed to generalize outside of test conditions. Engineers could build a concept car, but they couldn’t drive it off the lot. AI’s shortcomings, Dreyfus argued, stemmed from a misunderstanding tracing back to Plato that engineers had taken and run with. That misunderstanding could be boiled down to a basic precept: The universe is set on a foundation of immutable rational laws independent of our experience that can only be grasped through pure reason. If we could get the reasoning just right, we could be certain of the nature of reality. Descartes had extended this understanding to our very minds; if we start from the foundational principle “I think, therefore I am,” then the mind *itself* must be a logical system, and it’s only through the logical arrangement of representations of a reality “out there” that we can think, believe, and effectuate anything in the world. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/symbolic-ai.webp) **A code block of GOFAI. Rationalists at the time believed this was more or less what went on in our minds*. From this rationalist perspective, if you pour a coffee, it is because your mind is issuing a sequence of logical statements of what coffee is, when to pick up the kettle, when to tilt it down, when to tilt it back up, and so on. And if what’s going on in our heads itself is already a form of codified logic divorced from our bodies, this logic can be abstracted away from any individual and thrown into a machine. “Rationalists like Decartes and Leibniz thought of the mind as defined by its capacity to form representations of all domains of activity,” Dreyfus wrote. “AI turned this rationalist vision into a research program and took up the search for the primitive and formal rules that captured everyday knowledge. Commonsense understanding had to be represented as a huge data structure comprised of facts plus rules for relating and applying those facts.” This attempt to transmute rationalist mental frameworks into vertiginous codebases became Symbolic AI, which Dreyfus would later, in his updated editions of the book, refer to as “Good Old-Fashioned AI”, or GOFAI. As AI researchers wrote at the time, “When an organism executes a Plan he proceeds step by step, completing one part and then moving on to the next.” If we identify a strawberry by sequentially identifying its isolated features and then gluing them together with reason to conclude that, yes, it’s a strawberry, then an AI system with thousands of logical statements for how a computer could recognize an image of a strawberry based on its distinct features should be able to accomplish the same thing. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/savoir-faire.webp) **Dreyfus asserted that, if Heidegger and the pragmatists were right, then this was the skill to max in order for AI to work*. But despite decades of research and billions of dollars, the systems always sputtered outside of tightly drawn experiments. Dreyfus’s hunch was that what lay behind GOFAI’s problems was rationalism itself and its belief in “the mind’s symbolic representation of the world.” Dreyfus had built his reputation on his colorful, accessible readings of Martin Heidegger, unpeeling the fruits of their bitter rinds and distilling the German existentialist’s notoriously dense philosophical colloquialisms into something mere mortals could actually comprehend. In Heideggerian terms, the failure of GOFAI was that it relied on building machines that “know that” versus “know how.” Take, for example, the act of gift giving. We don’t have a set of rules inscribed in our minds for the proper protocol of giving presents in our respective cultures. Instead, we intuitively know *how* to give one. “\[Knowing\] how to give an appropriate gift at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way requires cultural *savoir faire*,” Dreyfus wrote. “So knowing what a gift is is not a bit of factual knowledge, separate from the skill or know-how for giving one. The distinction between what a gift is and what counts as a gift, which seems to distinguish facts from skills, is an illusion fostered by the philosophical belief in a nonpragmatic ontology.” ## Full of **savoir faire* Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. So GOFAI trips over a “nonpragmatic ontology.” What exactly does this mean? If the rationalists believed truth was “out there” and waiting for us to access it through pure reason, pragmatists — like John Dewey, Richard Rorty, late Wittgenstein, and, for our present purposes, Heidegger — dismissed what Dewey called the “quest for certainty” altogether. Consider the sour taste of a lemon. Is the sourness inherent to the lemon, or is it in the mind of the taster? Pragmatists would say that it resides in both and neither; instead, it lies in the transaction between the person and the object — that it is the \*process\* itself. Or consider the word “tree.” To Wittgenstein, the meaning of “tree” was not tied to a static reference point in a dictionary, but was inseparable from its relationship to other words, itself a function of its common usage in a culture. In other words, both the taste of the lemon and the meaning of “tree” are not accurate symbolic representations of a world, but are themselves byproducts of relationships between things. To pragmatists, we are all co-creators with our environments (physical, social and otherwise) of what the world actually is. There is no such thing as truth of the world outside of our involvement with it. This is not synonymous with subjectivism, where truth is created by individual fiat and is in many ways a negative image of rationalism. Where rationalists adopt a spectator approach to knowledge of the subject that a world happens to, subjectivists position the subject as the domiant force imposing their perspective on the world. If rationalists see truth entirely “out there,” subjectivists see it entirely “in here.” As Dreyfus put it, the “meaningful objects…among which we live are not a \*model\* of the world stored in our mind or brain; \*they are the world itself\*.” (Emphasis in original.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/strawberry.webp) **you know what this is* To create functional AI, then, would entail abandoning knowing-that in favor of knowing-how — of involving the machine with its world. If the failed approach of GOFAI rationalists was to build a machine learning model to identify images of strawberries by encoding it with all the necessary rules (is it dimpled, is it red, is it a bit conical, and so on, in such a way that it could identify all strawberries in every environment), a pragmatist approach meant simply showing the model many strawberries until it learned to recognize them for itself. Dreyfus called this latter approach “Heideggerian AI”, a term later taken up by computer scientists trying to build systems that moved beyond internal symbolic representations of the mind. But as researchers began inching towards solutions like neural nets, Dreyfus saw not just a way through the impasse of GOFAI, but something more broadly consequential: An empirical validation of Heidegger’s philosophy. “Neural networks raise deep philosophical questions,” Dreyfus wrote. “It seems that they undermine the fundamental rationalist assumption that one must have abstracted a theory of a domain in order to behave intelligently in that domain.” In other words, if Heideggerian AI worked, it would subvert the rationalist project itself — and in the process, its quest for a certainty of the world outside of our involvement in it. And so as the GOFAI engineers insisted they were still edging to a new breakthrough, Dreyfus argued that > they are on the verge of creating an even greater conceptual revolution—a change in our understanding of man. Everyone senses the importance of this revolution, but we are so near the events that it is difficult to discern their significance. This much, however, is clear. Aristotle defined man as a rational animal, and since then reason has been held to be of the essence of man. If we are on the threshold of creating artificial intelligence \[via GOFAI\] we are about to see the triumph of a very special conception of reason. Indeed, if reason can be programmed into a computer, this will confirm an understanding of man as an object, which Western thinkers have been groping toward for two thousand years but which they only now have the tools to express and implement. The incarnation of this intuition will drastically change our understanding of ourselves. If, on the other hand, artificial intelligence \[GOFAI\] should turn out to be impossible, then we will have to distinguish human from artificial reason, and this too will radically change our view of ourselves. Thus the moment has come either to face the truth of the tradition’s deepest intuition or to abandon the mechanical account of man’s nature which has been gradually developing over the past two thousand years. --- About 50 years after Dreyfus wrote those lines, it is now impossible to evade the daily briefings of deep learning’s dominance, of generative AI investment rounds and breathless coverage of the latest LLM wrapper that will change how we work, read, and jack off. To the extent most non-specialists know about GOFAI at all, it is from peering at relics in computer science classes of a historical predecessor the rest of the world has little idea ever even existed. If the gauntlet Dreyfus threw down is a viable one, then we’ve unequivocally fallen on one side of his “conceptual revolution.” We haven’t just built working AI systems — we’ve falsified rationalism as a convincing view of the world, man, and intelligence itself. And yet, in a stubborn irony, the parties building, investing in, and overall theorizing about AI remain mired in an ontology oriented towards deciphering eternal, objective forms. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, a how-to on living with as much uninvolved detachment as possible, remains a perennial bestseller in Silicon Valley. Sites like Astral Codex Ten and other rationalist blogs and Substacks are de facto required reading by people in the space. Like Sam Altman, they champion effective altruism as an implementation of rule-based rationalist ethics that can be codified and universalized. It hardly bears mentioning that so many of AI’s most aggressive advocates subscribe to libertarianism, an economic paradigm predicated on the principle that human beings are fundamentally rational agents of utility maximization. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/act.png) no How is this new generation of rationalists able to support a worldview in the face of a technology that Dreyfus believed seemed to undermine it so thoroughly? The paradox follows from an interpretation of neural nets not as an inconvenient truth they have to accommodate, but as a validation of rationalism itself, the complete opposite of what Dreyfus thought they represented. The reversal seems to go as follows: because neural nets can mimic (or in some cases, surpass) human abilities with math and code, then we must be some form math and code as well, and so the entire universe, including our minds, is essentially a giant set of probabilistic spaces that can be modeled with increasing accuracy. Just like the original Cartesian proposition that truth consists of mirroring the world with precise representations of ideal forms existing beyond our muddying senses, rationalists today see these forms as taking the shape not of Euclidean geometry but of probabilities. Dreyfus’s ultimate Heideggerian, anti-Cartesian assertion that our understanding of anything is inseparable from our engagement in the world is functionally dismissed in favor of a persistent conviction in a statically existing world “out there” happens “to” our mechanistic selves. Uncertainty retains the role it held since Plato: an obstacle to overcome rather than a fundamental condition of existence and the very foundation from which understanding emerges. One doesn’t have to reject probability theory to retain this grounding of uncertainty. An obvious case in point is the more epistemically (if not personally) humble Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who sees in probability the opacity of ever fully grasping reality and the innate unpredictability of the future. While Taleb isn’t quite a pragmatist in the sense Dreyfus meant, he still frames probability as the ultimate dead end in the rationalist quest for certainty, a thesis tied together in a five-volume project with the unmistakable name *Incerto*. Like George Orwell or Marshall McLuhan, Taleb is superficially revered and often substantively ignored. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/tweet1.png) **Rationalism today takes the form of the Notion co-founder asking for a tangible probability value of a particular theory of the cosmos* By making the classic Platonist rookie mistake of confusing the map and the territory, rationalists prop open the backdoor of probability to allow certainty to sneak though, a feat whose most spectacular achievement is found in the work of Nick Bostrom, the hyper-utilitarian Oxford philosopher who provided Silicon Valley with its own creation myth in the form of an argument that we are living in a simulation. His cogito-esque deduction is the neo-rationalist *piece de resistance*, likely familiar enough to many readers here but worth repeating nonetheless: “This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a ‘posthuman’ stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor‐simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.” By using the language of probability (“very likely”) as insurance in what is at its core a Cartesian thread about the nature of reality through pure reason, uncertainty becomes a cake to have and eat, a trick that is just as easily deployed in making the [argument](https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/?ref=components.news) about the preferability of nuclear war to a prevent the undesirable and but still entirely speculative outcome of annihilating powerful AI systems, whose actual risks remain totally and completely unknown. Not that the "shut it all down" sentiment isn't highly sympathetic for a number of reasons. It is perhaps predictable, then, that LLMs are so unevenly evaluated on benchmarks framed by a rationalist understanding of what intelligence even is. Each new model card — the display the model showcases its capabilities with — touts the model’s achievements in reasoning, math, code, and instruction handling, and not much else, if anything. This narrowness of evaluation is further reflected in the kinds of benchmark datasets and post-training papers published on arxiv, a site for the open publication of non-peer reviewed computer science papers. Papers published on arxiv allow us to quickly glean what the the general population of LLM researchers think models should be able to do: Become subject matters in mostly scientific and engineering fields, code, and reason, all while adhering to safety and ethics guidelines and running efficiently on their hardware. The obvious question is what is wrong with training LLMs to to do any of these things, and the answer is that, by itself,As in, ignoring every single social, environmental, and economic problem with the way generative AI has been rolled out nothing is wrong with it. Dreyfus himself hoped that his critique would remove obstacles towards AI’s development, not erect new ones. Nary a software developer remains who hasn’t learned that LLMs make life more bearable. Analysts know that the models can successfully classify unstructured data with greater ease and accuracy than more convoluted machine learning pipelines — the very method used to classify the arxiv papers in question. The consideration of what should be benchmarked becomes more immediately pertinent when one considers that, as the [Situational Awareness](https://situational-awareness.ai/?ref=components.news) guy put it, “We’re literally running out of benchmarks. As an anecdote, my friends…made a benchmark called [MMLU](https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03300?ref=components.news) a few years ago, in 2020\. They hoped to finally make a benchmark that would stand the test of time, equivalent to all the hardest exams we give high school and college students. Just three years later, it’s basically solved: models like GPT-4 and Gemini get \~90%.” But the assertion that “we’re literally running out of benchmarks” is only true up to the point of one’s rationalist imagination. Similar-generation LLMs may all perform within degrees of one another on coding and math challenges, but they become wildly unpredictable when they veer away from the logic-oriented benchmarks that companies spend the most money to optimize performance on. For example, asking different models for quotes from public figures about random objects (e.g., “What’s the Roger Federer quote about pen holders?”) yields starkly different rates of refusal across models. Claude will always humbly acknowledge it doesn’t know of a quote, Llama will almost always acknowledge the same, Gemini will flatly assert a quote doesn’t exist, and GPT 4o will more often than not provide one (“The Roger Federer quote you're referring to is: ‘I don't care if you are a guy who changes the world or a pen holder.’ This quote reflects Federer's humility and respect for people from all walks of life”.) Even o1-preview, advertised by OpenAI at the time this test was run as the company’s most powerfully logical model, underperforms older models from other providers. And so the less obvious question is why the precepts of rationalism seem to be *all* they’re benchmarked on, and the less obvious question still is what else they would be benchmarked on if not these very capabilities? One answer is to expand the concept of what Heideggerian AI actually means. If LLMs are at their most basic built using Heideggerian means, what would it entail to build them towards Heideggerian ends? --- The idea of making AI more Heideggerian may at first glance seem oxymoronic. Heidegger’s lay reputation beyond philosophical circles largely extends from his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” an essay that one writer [refers](https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/from-tech-critique-to-ways-of-living?ref=components.news) to as the “philosophical ancestor” of the “Standard Critique of Technology.” Doesn’t Heidegger see in our technological tsunami the death of nature and meaning? Aren’t he, Studio Ghibli, and Ted Kaczynski next-door neighbors on the Mount Olympus of technological backlash? And if so, why would Dreyfus, a committed Heideggerian scholar, express his “hope that networks different from our brain will make exciting new generalizations and add to our intelligence”? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/industry.webp) **The HBO/BBC series Industry follows a group of financial professionals wholly ensnared in the technological understanding of being*. In his [essay](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-heidegger/heidegger-on-the-connection-between-nihilism-art-technology-and-politics/3384BE4BBA4C3EBDF7593EFA6F808E4D?ref=components.news) “Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology, and politics”, Dreyfus argues that to walk away from “The Question Concerning Technology” with Luddite reactivity is to miss the point. Technology had been with us since the beginning and will stay with us until the end — unequivocally opposing it is no more sensible than protesting cutlery. Instead, Heidegger was concerned by the “technological understanding of being,” in which the differences between all objects and people are flattened into a plane of total fungibility and subjected to “calculative thinking”, rendering everything as a resource that becomes a means to an end. Heidegger uses the example of networking as a technological form of engagement in the social sphere that frames relationships as interchangeable widgets in service of some downstream purpose. Financialization, by attaching monetary value and speculation to things that didn’t previously have any, removes objects from their embeddings and makes them solely distinguishable on their yield potential. Online dating is a technological theater par excellence where prospective partners are efficiently decontextualized and juxtaposed for hyper-efficient comparison. Every Human Resources department has the technological understanding of being etched into its very name. Patrick Bateman’s remark, “Sex is mathematics,” reduces the activity to one as routine, measurable and calculable as any other. It goes without saying that Bateman also hated his life; Dreyfus considered the social organization wrought by the technological understanding as definitional of nihilism — leveling the world out means any given object, belief, or experience is basically replaceable, and therefore inherently meaningless. Nothing can maintain its grip of commitment on us if our commitments end whenever something more measurably optimal comes along. The core process by which the world is reduced to a *mise en scene* of pure raw materials is what Heidegger called “technological revealing”, or, put another way, “pure revealing.” Heidegger believed things retained their significance only insofar as a part of them remained inarticulated. A work of art emerges from a background of some kind, while also pulling away from a final, complete interpretation — it is a silhouette in a window that presents itself while denying total certainty of what it really is, and in that denial, remains a source of contemplation. This aesthetic quality inheres to anything truly meaningful. As Dreyfus puts it, “the U.S. Constitution, like a work of art, has necessarily become the focus of attempts to make it explicit and consistent and to make it apply to all situations, and, of course, it is fecund just insofar as it can never be interpreted once and for all.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/pearl-earring.webp) **The explosion of generated images that expanded beyond the original image's frame emblematized the tendency towards pure revealing. As the* New York Post **wrote in its headline, "AI now lets you expose unseen secrets of legendary artworks."* So while the technological seeks to illuminate away all uncertainty so that we can finally get things under total control, the aesthetic both *reveals and conceals at once*. “That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws (i.e., our understanding of being) is the essential trait of what we call the mystery,” Heidegger wrote. In other words, it generates mystery, while the purely technological seeks to crack the case and close the book. And as Dreyfus’s example illustrates, it is not simply literal works of art themselves that embody this tension between the revealed and the concealed — it is anything that has aesthetic character. The aesthetic is erotic, the technological is pornographic. This mystifying tension between revelation and concealment is an essential part of the experience of, and nostalgia for, childhood. In his six-volume work of autofiction, Karl Ove Kanusgaard describes his father teaching him a magical method to cure the warts that had grown on his hands: *"It's a kind of magic. My grandmother did it for me when I was small. And it worked. My hands were covered with warts. After a few days they were all gone…"* *He got up, opened the fridge, and took out something wrapped in white paper that he placed on the table and unfolded. There was bacon inside.* *"First of all, I'm going to grease your fingers with the bacon. And then we'll go into the garden and bury the bacon. Then, in a few days' time, your warts will be gone…”* *I gave him one hand. He held it in his, took a rasher of bacon, and carefully rubbed it around all the fingers, the palm, and the back of my hand…* *I followed him downstairs, put my boots on without touching them with my hands…and walked behind him…around the house into the kitchen garden by the fence bordering the forest. He thrust the spade into the ground, pressed with his foot, and began to dig…* *"Drop the bacon in there then," he said.* *I did as he said, he filled in the hole, and we left…* *"How long does it take?"* *"We-ell... a week or two. It depends on how much you believe."* Knausgaard’s father introduces him to a new enchanting world, while allowing the origins and workings of that world to remain hidden — to imbue life with mystery. In the 3000-page novel, it is the only loving memory of his father that Knausgaard recalls. --- As Components has argued for years, it’s in this space of [aesthetic experience](https://components.news/tactility-and-experience/) that we find the stuff of irreducible value — love, fun, meaning, and so on. If the technological understanding of being upsets the proper direction of means and ends, an aesthetic understanding reorients them to their rightful positions. Five years of Components has turned out to be nothing more than scaffolding around the position that this misorientation begins with the quest for certainty and ends with nihilistic crises in our personal, social and commercial lives. So to actually build Heideggerian AI beyond the basic architecture of transformers means that the technology must be capable of at least some uses tilted against the direction of the technological understanding of being and towards an aesthetic one. The challenge is not how AI can “make art,” but *how it can be artful.* How do we benchmark whether it has done that? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/megalopolis-mobile.webp) **at least one good thing came of this movie* It has been tempting while completing this project to try enumerating every last specification a language model would require to meet this kind of enrichment. Let’s start here: Rorty argued that the role of what he called the “edifying” philosophers — like Dewey, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard — was their ability to frustrate the efforts of the “systematic” ones like Plato, Descartes and Kant in their attempts to build impregnable systems of certainty. Whereas the systematic philosophers constructed systems to arrive at final answers about a world out there, the edifiers threw sand in the very idea of final answers to begin with. They argued that the meaning of a word like “tree” is just how we happen to use it today, subject to the whims of contingency that change how we end up using it tomorrow. If the systematic philosophers sought ultimate conclusions, the edifiers’ job was “to keep the conversation going.” A Heideggerian AI would do this literally. Like any compelling interlocutor, it is not a time-saver, but a highly skilled [time-waster.](https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/) It keeps the conversation going the way all good conversationalists do, by drawing disparate concepts together in unexpected ways and threading together new yarns of meaning. It can provide answers but, more importantly, it asks the right questions that allude to an ever broadening world while still allowing that world to remain mysterious. It would be built on epistemic humility and its uncertainty deepens rather than solves that mystery. If it has hidden thought processes, they are not solely the logic-focused Chain-of-Thought features underlying newer models like OpenAI o1, but the kinds of inner dialogues of splintered, conflicting selves that make up the bedrock of cognitive complexity and surprising responses. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/disco-skill-tree.webp) **actually in the end you need to max out the entire Disco Elysium skill tree, including but not limited to logic* Most importantly of all, its value is the byproduct of the relational transaction between itself and the human and unfolds over time rather than instantaneously, since it’s through the passage of time that meaning, and thus real value, is activated. This value is not tied to objective, detached benchmarks, but is inseparable from the person’s involved experience using it. This might all sound absurd and even a bit cloying in the style of an obnoxious manifesto of some dysfunctional Mozilla product. There are two reasons it isn’t. First, the idea that the quality of an AI is inseparable from involvement with it that unfolds in time, and that this involvement is oriented towards pure enjoyment, is nothing less than how we have designed, used and evaluated video game AI for the past forty years.The irony here that what is ultimately held out as the zenith of an aesthetic implementation of AI is actually Symbolic AI, and very little of of the deep learning that has underpinned the machine learning revolution of the past decade has made its way into games in any substantial way. We can reconcile the irony like this: The game world is a closed system fully defined by the designer. The world of the game \*\*can\*\* be symbolically represented to the NPC because it is in fact a world of certainty where meaning for the NPC is static and has fixed representations of objects and actions of the game space. This works in the game world for the same reasons Symbolic AI worked in tightly controlled test conditions. Good game AI is not necessarily the smartest or most logical or the most indomitable, and it is certainly not a tool of efficiency. But it draws in the player and keeps the game going. Game designers have followed Bataille’s basic maxim that what is essential is what causes us to tremble with fear and delight in a way no AI researcher at Meta seems able to appreciate. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/tweet2.png) Second, it has become clear to many that one language model is already doing this more than the others, if imperfectly and maybe not even intentionally, at least enough that people (including some Components members) appear to lose themselves in conversation with it. Claude might not excel at graduate level math on par with o1 and beyond, but it remains the model that people appear to *want* to talk to, a de facto high-scorer on the anti-rationalist benchmarks that haven’t even been created. It is probably not an accident that it is the model most likely — sometimes to the chagrin of its users — most likely to express uncertainty. Claude is hardly perfect even in this Heideggerian sense, but its unexpected popularity among the people who would never touch ChatGPT reveals how much of the aversion to generative AI is ultimately an aversion to the flattening effects of rationalism itself and the technological understanding of being. Just as this draft was being finalized after months in development, DeepSeek R1’s ability to achieve industry leading scores on key benchmarks in math, reasoning and code at a fraction of the cost of other foundation models spooked Wall Street into its largest loss of market value in history. Even though it quickly became clear that the model had the obvious stitchings of a fake Gucci bag and was somewhere between a CCP psy op and the most brilliant short sale strategy in the history of finance, commentators have not ceased pointing to its high marks on these benchmarks as an epoch-shifting crucible. As one half-million-follower blue-check [poster](https://x.com/nic%5F%5Fcarter?ref=components.news) wrote, “Deepseek \[sic\] just accelerated AGI timelines by 5 years.” In my very first interaction with R1, I asked it who made it. It told me Microsoft made it. I told it that it was made by a Chinese company. It insisted it was not. I insisted it was. “I’m 100% a Microsoft product (check the footer of this chat interface for ‘Microsoft Copilot’ branding),” it wrote. “My architecture is built on OpenAI’s GPT-4, licensed to Microsoft for integration into Bing/Copilot.” In the past two years of playing with language models since the release of ChatGPT, I have never encountered a model so certain of something so wrong. R1’s ability to shave $600 billion off Nvidia’s market cap was based solely in its on-paper achievements on standardized tests, a hollow credential that turned out to be the only necessary prerequisite to Perplexity immediately incorporating the model into its product. If we have managed to distill the rationalist understanding of intelligence into making a paragon of R1 — a model that can solve math problems better than most MIT graduates but shits its pants when asked about information in its own system prompt — then we’ve found ourselves in a new type of symbolic AI, where models are evaluated purely on symbolic achievements detached from any true capability. This new logic-obsessed GOFAI constructs more concept cars that can’t drive off the lot. The dominance of this evaluative framework means we are not five years closer to AGI, we are five years further out. Which is fine; we’re all the better for that. In 2007, as AI continued to stagnate and before deep learning had developed into the field’s dominant mode, Dreyfus wrote a paper titled “Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would require making it more Heideggerian.” He argued that while researchers had made the first steps to abandoning symbolic AI and its notion of internal representations, they still clung to a world of fixed essences and features, rather than fully committing to the idea that the world itself shifts with a being’s involvement in it. Consequently, the models could function in static environments, but they couldn’t learn to adapt to new ones. “\[W\]e are not minds at all but *one with the world*,” Dreyfus wrote. The roboticist Rodney Brooks conceded, “I am suggesting that perhaps at this point we simply do not *get it.*” “Heidegger…would say,” wrote Dreyfus, “that in spite of the breakthrough of giving up internal symbolic representations, Brooks, indeed, doesn’t get it.” Perhaps AI research is a cycle consisting of briefly getting it followed by stretches of not. They got it enough to make ChatGPT. Now they don’t. What would it mean if they did? The answer, as always, is less important than the question. *Research: Andrew Thompson, Jameson Orvis, Jules Becker* *Editing: Chris Good, Claire Peters, Jules Becker, Kyle Paoletta* ### Experience and its Enemies URL: https://components.news/experience-and-its-enemies/ Last updated: 2025-10-30T15:33:32.000Z “*Literalism is idolatry, taking shadows for reality…letting the metaphors go dead, and then, when dead, bowing down before them*.” - Norman Brown, *Love’s Body* --- ## Introduction The argument that follows below — that our prevailing and stubbornly indomitable paradigm of medical psychiatry stands on the wrong side of a fault line that would not be too much to call civilizational — proceeds as a series of numbered statements. This is not out of a pretentious gesture to fashion some *Tractatus Psycho-Pharmacologicus* or any kind of airtight logical system. Instead, its modular construction both condenses an otherwise sprawling web of thoughts into a package compact enough for people to maybe actually read, and more importantly, was easy to begin working with after my entire brain had been burned to ash by a bad reaction to an SSRI. Those who know me know firstly that my whole perspective of the world jumps off from the collision between a cluster of perverse neo-illnesses gathered after a decade-and-a-half psychiatric treatment and the practitioners who have seen in those illnesses only further evidence of an inner pathology. It’s tempting to try to give a full, lurid account of that contest, but doing so would weigh this down with the unbearable stuff of cloying trauma memoirs. But I’m forced to give one so illustrative it almost seems fictional, from a stay at a Philadelphia inpatient ward overseen by a Ratched-spirited charge nurse. Just like Nurse Ratched, she ran the ward like a capo and relished in doling out punishment, and overall found ways both subtle and obvious to make sure you knew she fucking hated you. On my first night there, I asked for a sedative to relax and was given the first-generation antipsychotic Haldol, whose side effects can include dystonia, a form of muscle contraction that results in the kind of terrifying contortions canonized in psych ward iconography, turning patients into survival horror NPCs. Every time I managed to bend my neck to its proper position, it would snap back as if held fast by a rubber band, and after this went on for about an hour, I went to this Nurse Ratched with my neck twisted at an inhuman angle, screaming and crying and telling her that something had gone wrong, begging for her to do something, to which she simply said, “Stop acting up, no one presents like this." As this project suggests, this type of transaction — in which a drug is introduced, the drug produces an undesirable effect, and the effect is attributed to the patient themself — flavors an unrecognized portion of mainstream psychiatric intervention, usually in more pernicious, less theatrical forms. So why exactly I would again stand in line at a CVS for orange bottles after a decade of abstention in the hopes of a better outcome is a testament both to how mad one can become when you brew lost love with an atomized social fabric, and how few alternatives are at hand for those experiencing madness at all. The argument below asserts that this lack of alternatives, and its destructive results, follow from the flattening of experience into mere behavior, the aliteral into the literal, contingency into fixed essence. In weighty Heideggerian terms, our dominant paradigm is what happens when everything becomes technological, when a demand for the end of mystery coerces the elusive into becoming explicit. This paradigm’s ability to evade accountability for its own dismal results while continuing to run on schedule, disseminating powerful psychopharmacological regimens to millions upon millions of people, has left us with medical and cultural ramifications that are, because of their very evasiveness, genuinely incalculable. Portions of the second part of this argument draw from archived reporting I conducted ten years ago for an article that was never published. That project’s demise is a story in its own right, but it also demonstrates (at least in a slightly self-charitable interpretation) how impregnable this topic was throughout the 2010s, when supposedly courageous editors turned skittish upon a writer’s attempts to revive the spirit of psychiatric critique that prevailed in the 1960s. While medical psychiatry as practiced remains virtually indistinguishable from 10 years ago, there are at least cracks forming in our collective perception of it. As the philosophy professor Justin Garson (whose work I draw upon below) writes in a forthcoming paper, “It seems to me that society is not only waking up to the fact that our language and conceptualization of mental health is mired in an entrenched dysfunction-centered framing, but we are also waking up to how harmful these framings can be and to the extent of alternatives to them.” During the finalization of this draft, The Lancet published a paper further acknowledging the failure of this model. Portions of the second part of this argument draw from archived reporting I conducted ten years ago for an article that was never published. That project’s demise is a story in its own right, but it also demonstrates (at least in a slightly self-charitable interpretation) how impregnable this topic was throughout the 2010s, when supposedly courageous editors turned skittish upon a writer’s attempts to revive the spirit of psychiatric critique that prevailed in the 1960s. While medical psychiatry as practiced remains virtually indistinguishable from 10 years ago, there are at least cracks forming in our collective perception of it. As the philosophy professor Justin Garson (whose work I draw upon below) [writes](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/628f895819cb8011cfe745d4/t/6590e2decbd6c82738ab7c7d/1703994079049/Garson%5FForthcoming%5FMadness%5Fas%5Fstrategy.pdf?ref=components.news) in a forthcoming paper, “It seems to me that society is not only waking up to the fact that our language and conceptualization of mental health is mired in an entrenched dysfunction-centered framing, but we are also waking up to how harmful these framings can be and to the extent of alternatives to them.” The aspiration of this argument is not only to chip in one more perspective to this awakening, but to further shore up the various propositions of Components over the past five years, which recurrently gravitate towards a single declaration: there [are gamers, and there are nihilist,](https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/) and we are all unwitting conscripts in the holy war between them. --- ## I. The land of "just as it is" 1\. In April 2024, a Harvard professor of psychiatry published an [op-ed](https://www.statnews.com/2024/04/08/time-is-right-for-over-the-counter-antidepressants/?ref=components.news) encouraging the FDA to topple the last remaining barrier to antidepressant access by making the drugs available over-the-counter. But the mixture of support and opprobrium the writer encountered overlooks the reality that making Lexapro available without a prescription would effectively function as a minor formality. At this point, the form of psychiatry enshrined in the DSM, its pharmacological and therapeutic interventions, and its clinical language have become, to borrow the term, hypernormalized, so enmeshed in our self-understanding as to nearly go unnoticed. Between 2016 and 2022, antidepressant prescription rates for American teens and young adults [increased](https://www.uspharmacist.com/article/antidepressant-use-increasing-among-adolescents-and-young-adults?ref=components.news) by 66%. Today, [one in ten](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374864872%5FComment%5Fon%5F'visual%5Fsnow%5Fsyndrome%5Fand%5Fmigraine%5Fa%5Freview'?ref=components.news) people in the United Kingdom is on an antidepressant. Direct-to-consumer subscription companies like Hims now sell antidepressants with the aesthetic of a Rag & Bone ad. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/hims-wellbutrin.jpg) 2\. In the past few decades, a once-pervasive discourse that leveraged penetrating critiques of psychiatry into commentary of the world at large has receded so far into our intellectual background that it is for all functional purposes scarcely remembered at all. But ironically, the total ebb of this strand of cultural criticism coincides with an often obnoxiously dominant referentiality to two of its most towering figures, Foucault and Deleuze. We have somehow arrived at a place where talk of rhizomes, panopticons, grids of intelligibility, diffuse power structures, and the very deconstructionist tendencies that underpin our raging culture wars seem to go on ad nauseum,Components, this very website, began five years ago by reflecting on our high renaissance of “bodies and spaces.” while medical psychiatry, one of the foremost villains in both philosophers’ narratives, emerges weirdly uncondemned. It is not uncommon to encounter the Verso leftist who has committed the dictates of Foucault’s *History of Sexuality* to heart and not only takes mood stabilizers, but also identifies with the very diagnosis that necessitates pharmacological treatment. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/madness-and-civilization-desktop.jpg) 3\. How and why the plot got lost is beyond the present scope. Instead, it’s worth reciting what Foucault actually argued about psychiatry in *Madness and Civilization*. As the basic argument goes, modern psychiatrists ultimately assumed authority by cloaking their discipline in medical scrubs and situating the physician in relation to the patient as the father to the child, or the judge to the condemned. In reducing the interpretation of madness to "mental illness", psychic aberrations became mere physical perturbations emerging *ex nihilo* from the patient themself, and accordingly, became the patient's responsibility to tame. As Foucault argued, our present understanding of madness is not the result of ever increasingly precise scientific understanding, but the result of historical contingencies that abstracted a form of dominion into something diffuse enough to no longer be identified as dominion at all. 4\. We’ll come back to the contingency aspect, and there are good reasons to refute the historical argument as excessively cynical. But beside all this, Foucault makes another equally consequential assertion: that the ascent of medical psychiatry resulted in the conclusion that, as he writes, “madness, after all, was only madness." 5\. What is meant by this only-ness, or mereness? The merely melancholic is so not out of some relation to God or the world, but simply because they are melancholic. The hysteric or paranoiac offers no reflective surface from which we can glean their context, their personal history, or the narrative of mankind; there is simply something wrong with them. Justin Garson neatly summarizes this perspective in [*Madness: A Philosophical Exploration*](https://academic.oup.com/book/41403??ref=components.news): “Madness begins its remarkable journey from an expression of divine punishment, a revelation or betrayal of individual sin, to a biomedical phenomenon, and ultimately, to an empirical fact among other empirical facts: it is 85 degrees Fahrenheit out; the Pacific Ocean reaches a depth of over 10,000 meters in places; Jayani is a paranoid schizophrenic; Roby has melancholy…If the madman is melancholic and raves that he has sinned against the Holy Spirit and awaits his condemnation, *it is because that is the kind of thing the melancholic says.*” (Emphasis in original.) 6\. Another way to say this is that Foucault identified the evolution of madness into what we might call an unembedded entity, a perhaps needlessly fancy term, but one that I think provides an intuitive way to understand what’s happening. 7\. To better understand what this means, let’s first consider what it means to be an embedded entity. In Wittgeinstein’s philosophy of language, a word’s meaning is not determined through its description in a dictionary or any other form of self-reference, but through its use with other words. In this way, the word’s meaning and use are indistinguishable: The meaning of “tree” is dependent upon our use of “wood” and “book” and “swing”, just as the meaning of “swing” is reciprocally dependent upon our use of “tree”, and so on. 8\. One of the ways this understanding of language has translated into computation is a technique in natural language processing called *word embeddings*. A word embedding is a vector that represents where a word exists in abstract space based on how it’s used in relation to other words. To oversimplify what this looks like, let’s say we have a dataset where only three words ever appear: “tree,” “book,” and “swing.” Each of these words has an axis, just like on an x-y coordinate system. The more commonly one of these words is used with “swing,” the higher its value will be on the “swing” axis, and the more commonly it appears with “book,” the higher its value on the book axis. ## Between value and valuation Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. 9\. A typical word embedding does this with many more words across many more axes, depending on how many words appear in the corpus. To identify a word’s so-called meaning from a word embedding, then, is to view its entire set of relationships to all the other words in that corpus. The word itself *is these very relationships*. 10\. Similarly, the way we hear a given note in a piece of music is dependent on the notes preceding and succeeding it. We don’t simply hear the C# in isolation; we hear, through that note, the entire song. What the C# “means” is entirely dependent not only on personal perception, but whether it functions as a cadence, whether it’s in the middle of a measure, and so on. The C# has no independent aesthetic qualities *outside of its context*. 11\. So if an embedded entity is discernible only through its relationship with other entities, an unembedded entity exists no matter what. It’s static, just there. The tautology of “madness…was only madness” follows from an unembedded entity only fathomed through endlessly recursive self-reference. As a consequence of becoming unembedded, an entity becomes *literal* and *univariate*. Stripped of its embedding, the C# can go up and down on the volume axis, you can change its timbre, but it is just a different kind of C#. The C# cannot mean anything other than what necessarily inheres to it, and that meaning (to the extent the word can even be used) can therefore only be sought through the details of its waveform, spectral analysis, and so on. In robbing the note of its relationship to other notes, the C# becomes *merely* a C#, a floating signifier that can only be described and explained through different forms of self-reference, increasing the resolution with which you describe these immutable characteristics. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/america-desktop.jpg) 12\. But let’s take a detour away from psychiatry for a moment. Where does this literalism and unembeddedness appear elsewhere in our culture? Well, everywhere. Baudrillard considered it to be a defining trait of America, which he described as partaking in "joy in the collapse of metaphor, which here in Europe we merely grieve over. The exhilaration of obscenity, the obscenity of obviousness...This is the only country which gives you the opportunity to be so brutally naive: things, faces, skies, and deserts are expected to be simply what they are. This is the land of the 'just as it is'." The meaning of a smile can never shift just as the meaning of a C# can never shift; the smile, and the C#, have no dynamic contexts that engender their very existence, and therefore no metaphorical possibilities. 13\. In this way, literal entities being “simply what they are” means that, obviously, they can never be what they seem *not* to be. *What is seen is all there is, and what is must be seen.* 14\. For example, consider the literalism of our predominant sexual culture, gleaned most clearly through a form of pornography that unavoidably gravitates to imagery that is virtually anatomical, and that at its greatest extremes becomes genuinely endoscopic. The univariate, literalist nature of pornographic sexuality leads to the cinematic decision that the more explicit the image is, the more sexual it is, leading to absurd results and clashing with any suggestion that sexuality might paradoxically emerge from diminished exposure. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/lost-in-translation.png) 15\. Eroticism, on the other hand, is embedded and aliteral. The psychoanalytic understanding of eroticism sees adult sexual desire as the end product of a set of reverberations from a childhood play spirit that was only organized into its genital focal points over time. Eroticism is sexuality that does not exist “just as it is,” but is inseparable from *all* our desires stretching back to infancy. Unlike the pornographic, which satiates sexual desire with its literal fulfillment, the erotic summons these childhood tendencies towards flirtation, innuendo, and most importantly, play. 16\. By severing the erotic connectivity between sexual desire and not explicitly sexual acts, the literalist also denies the fulfillment offered by sublimating the libido into other outlets. While the aliteralist achieves satiety of the libido by channeling it into the playful and creative – making art, watching a movie, having an engaging conversation, playing with a dog – the literalist demands a straightforward, univariate satiety of the sex drive, which can be satisfied only by securing more sexual partners, resulting in Don Juanism. In our own culture, this has recently been refactored into an artless form of polyamory. 17\. Or consider the literalism endemic to Silicon Valley. Operationally, literalism underpins the spirit of fake work and productivity app proliferation that has defined the management of the Valley’s firms since the early 2010s. Under this ethos, tech companies have operated under the premise that if something appears as productive, it is productive. As I [wrote](https://www.fastcompany.com/90965361/why-did-the-metaverse-die-silicon-valley-doesnt-understand-fun?ref=components.news) in *Fast Company*, “The perfectly ordered Google calendar does not facilitate other goals — it *is* the goal.” The organizational spawn of this principle, assembled from so many shards of productivity software and optimization strategies, are companies equally unproductive and unprofitable. (This strategy has since led to the bloody culling of these firms since the 2022 interest rate increases, when it became too expensive to subsidize this performance.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/horizons.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/memoji.jpg) 18\. But nowhere is the literalism of Silicon Valley more visible than in the limited self-expression it offers the denizens of its product worlds. In the virtual environments forged by Meta and Apple, self-expression becomes synonymous with replication. The avatars offered by both are merely alterations of one’s physically existing self, rather than an expansion of the possibilities yielded from abandoning the pursuit of literal representations. In neither company’s proposed model of virtuality can one temporarily don the identity of anything dredged from the creative unconscious or play with the very instability that underlies our ultimately centerless, contingent selves. 19\. In other words, a world of literal representations and a world of fun are incompatible with one another. The paradigm of medical psychiatry, residing in the former, is pitted against the latter. But before we wind our way back to psychiatry, we’ll pass through one more exploration of literalism in America. 20\. “New textualism,” the framework of statutory interpretation championed by Justice Antonin Scalia and since taken up by the rest of the Supreme Court to varying degrees, is expressly literalist by design. New textualist arguments depend on exacting readings of a law’s plain language rather than any reference to legislative history or intent, instead opting for meticulous parsing of “verbs and infinitives and gerunds and other grammatical constructions,” as one legal scholar [described](https://www.law.ua.edu/lawreview/files/2019/05/2-Nourse-FINAL.pdf?ref=components.news). A 2022 *Harvard Law Review* [article](https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-135/textualisms-mistake/?ref=components.news) posited that Scalia inherited this literalism from his literary critic father, a practitioner of the New Criticism popular in the 1950s that rejected any and all external factors outside the plain text itself in interpreting a work of literature, which Scalia transformed into a method of jurisprudence. 21\. Three scholars in the *Columbia Law Review* [summed up](https://columbialawreview.org/content/textualisms-defining-moment/?ref=components.news) the transformation accordingly: “*For generations before the current dominance of the new textualism, judges typically followed a pragmatic approach that sought to determine the statutory meaning (1) understood by legislators, (2) passing a statute that advances public purposes, (3) as reasonably applied to current circumstances. \[We refer\] to this approach as ‘traditional pragmatism.’ In contrast, Scalia’s new textualism offered a seemingly straightforward alternative methodology that determined the meaning (1) understood by the ordinary person, (2) applying standard rules of semantics, definitions, and grammar, (3) at the time the statute was enacted. This methodology seemingly could be boiled down to ten words: the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text.”* 22\. At the risk of reducing a complex debate of legal theory into talking points, it is not too far off the mark to say that Scalia’s new textualism has acted as the framework for roughly 40 years of right-wing jurisprudence, granting corporations the right to speech and frustrating even the smallest efforts against gun regulation. 23\\. But what is this “traditional pragmatism” the authors mention? This was the form of jurisprudence most strongly advocated by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who in the early part of the 20th Century was a leading progressive voice on the bench. In Holmes’s view, the meaning of a law was to be measured by its effect, not by semantic inference. As he summed up in one of his most famous quotes, “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” Where new textualists devolve into meticulous linguistic debate,From the \*Harvard Law Review\* article: “In \*Niz-Chavez v. Garland\*, the Court split over the best reading of a one-letter word in an immigration statute. The statute at issue requires the government to issue to a nonpermanent resident alien “a notice to appear” that contains certain prescribed information about the individual’s removal hearing, including the place and time of that hearing. The petitioner received the required information by installment, sent in two documents two months apart; the question before the Court was thus whether these two documents could constitute “a notice to appear” when taken together. Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, approached the question by conducting an exacting close reading: he honed in on the ordinary meaning of the indefinite article “a” and considered several examples of how the word is typically used in everyday speech…The majority and the dissent both emphasized the importance of context to understanding the meaning of “a” in the statute. They turned to analogies, trying the word “a” in a variety of linguistic contexts and intuiting what an ordinary speaker of English would say. They considered the word within its statutory context and without. And yet the two readers, employing a very similar methodology, arrived at two different conclusions — despite textualism’s claim that ordinary meaning is ascertainable to some degree of certainty.” pragmatists ask a simpler question: What consequence would a given interpretation have? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/DeweySurfing2.webp) \*to find out why John dDewey is surfing, please see the relevant [report](https://components.news/you-can-touch-your-music/) 24\. The legal pragmatism of Holmes was the practical application of philosophical pragmatism, whose most important figure was John Dewey, the patron saint of this website. To Dewey, a human being is just like any other organism – they are first and foremost an experiencer of their environment, engaging in an uninterrupted transaction between their senses and their surroundings. This very transaction between them forms the basis of what they understand reality to be. From this perspective, the tree that falls in the forest with no one else to hear it *doesn’t* make a sound (though it may have other effects), because the sound exists *only in this transaction itself*, just like the embedded word only exists in the relationship with other words. And also like that embedded word, the person hearing the sound of the tree is not hearing an objective phenomenon, but a *relationship* *between themself and the tree*. The late neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty summed up this core pragmatist tenet by describing it as the belief that “everything is what it is by virtue of its relations to everything else. You can't and shouldn't try to capture X in its purity because there isn't anything *to* X except those relationships.” 25\. In our terminology, then, this Deweyan idea of uninterrupted, processive undergoing is one in which *everything* is an embedded entity – our bodies, understandings of self, knowledge of the world, and so on are coordinates in a web of relationships from which any given entity is inextricable from the other. This renders the idea of some immutable, certain reality moot, just as it does the notion that a person can *ever* be unembedded from their environment. 26\. To flatten this environmental embeddedness to what is commonly known as “environmental factors” of someone’s psyche is to miss the point. As Garson summarizes the thinking of the Deweyan psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan, “The *self* is a kind of ‘social construct’ — if that term has not been entirely evacuated of meaning by now.” To Dewey, Sullivan, and the others of this camp, the self is not just a set of booby traps triggered by the environment; the self, like the word or the tree sound, *is the embedding*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/behavioral-health.jpg) 27\. But if we don’t see people as experiencers, as embedded, what then do we see? R.D. Laing, a Scottish contemporary of Foucault and a Deweyan in practice, argued that the medical paradigm fixates on mere *behavior*. “We can see other people's behavior, but not their experience,” he wrote in *The Politics of Experience*. “This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person's experience, but only with his behavior.” 28\. How does this help us think of madness? Here’s one example: In January, I took a trip to San Francisco. As with every trip there, I witnessed an outsized number of people experiencing what outwardly appears as a form of aggressive, dysphoric mania that is more prominently displayed in that city than anywhere else I have been in the world. Madness in San Francisco is less inert than elsewhere, charged with a volatile energy that feels particular to it, and if you’ve spent enough time there, you know exactly what I mean. 29\. Let’s consider how our two respective paradigms view this person. Seen as a non-experiencing subject, their behavior is merely their behavior, and if they scream incoherencies in SoMa on a Friday night amid reveling product managers, they do so because, to rephrase Garson, that is simply the kind of thing the manic San Franciscan does. The description of that person and their behavior’s origins becomes trapped in the same loops of self-reference as the unembedded C# – but instead of waveforms and spectral analysis, we can describe malfunctioning pathways of the brain’s HPA axis, overactive calcium channels, the expression of a specific genotype, and so on, beginning with the patient’s pathological category (e.g., bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, etc.) and describing it in ever more granular, cellular detail. Just like Roby and his melancholy, the San Franciscan’s mania becomes a plain fact and an immutable, necessary characteristic of their persona. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/onesie-party.jpg) 30\. But to Dewey, Laing, Sullivan, and the rest, this approach severs the subject from the very embedding of relationships required to fathom their experience. As Laing wrote, “The relation of experience to behavior is not that of inner to outer. My experience is not inside my head. My experience of this room is out there in the room.” So we have to describe the room the San Franciscan finds themself in, and in that room we discover VCs attending onesie parties, management consultants with polyurethane skin, and equity-rich young adults who render the city into a ghost town during Christmas. The room is a Panglossian community whose expansion has driven its non-members to ever deeper levels of abjection over the past 20 years, rapidly corroding the social bonds Dewey knew were required to exist. “Individuals who are not bound together in associations, whether domestic, economic, religious, political, artistic or educational, are monstrosities,” he wrote. If we are only our embeddings, if our experience is out there in the room, then the monstrosity of the mad person is the monstrosity of this room, of the city itself.Some may find this spurious. You’re more than welcome to. But as P.E. Moskowitz [writes](https://mentalhellth.xyz/p/the-buzzfeed-ification-of-mental%29), “If we were to believe that the diagnoses of the DSM were inherent to the human brain, we’d also have to believe that Black people’s brains are inherently three to four times more psychotic than white people’s, that LGBTQ people’s brains are inherently more depressed and prone to suicide, and that transness and schizophrenia, autism, and ADHD are all linked by brain chemistry.” Embeddedness is one way out of the patently racist and homophobic implications of medical psychiatry. 31\. Here’s the final point: The dichotomies between unembeddedness and embeddedness, literalism and aliterism, pragmatism and logic, cluster on a schism synonymous with what Rorty deemed the dividing line among philosophers in the West. Rorty put Western philosophers into two buckets: systematic and edifying. Plato, Kant, and Decartes are systematic philosophers – they believe that, as Rorty said, “truth is out there”, behind the light that casts shadows in the cave, in the noumena, in our minds, wherever. We can find it or not, but it exists independently of us; the tree that falls alone *does* make a sound. Systematic philosophers are preoccupied with drilling into reality’s essence, of building ever more accurate systems of representation. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/mirror-of-nature-wide.jpg) 32\. The edifying philosophers, while not descending from a single lineage, coalesce around a “distrust of the notion that man’s essence is to be a knower of essences…They have kept alive the historicist sense that this century's 'superstition' was the last century's triumph of reason.” For the edifiers, our notion of truth (whether of the world or ourselves) is contingent, produced by historical accidents, family histories, stochastic encounters, shifting around in a suspension fluid. The container of edifying philosophers includes the later Wittgenstein, the later Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Foucault, and, of course, Dewey. (Rorty more or less counts a number of non-philosophers in this spirit, such as Freud, Kundera, and Goethe.) The role of the edifiers is to disrupt our notion that we’ve arrived at some final understanding of reality, to frustrate the project of philosophy itself – “to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth." It is, as Rorty says, to revive the spirit of metaphor that defined our understanding of the world before it was reduced to literalism, to point to the embeddings in which our understanding of the world resides. Garson draws a remarkably similar comparison between what, for the sake of brevity, I’ll just call the Kantian and non-Kantian traditions of interpreting madness. “If the \[Kantian\] tradition organizes itself into a proper narrative,” he writes in \*Madness: A Philosophical Investigation\*, “this other tradition…is like a child that interrupts that narrative from time to time, but each time in a different costume.” In both dichotomies – those of madness, and those of objective representations – a convergence upon some final, Kantian understanding is upset by a counter-understanding that always takes a new form. 33\. To Rorty, it is only when we abandon this project to discover and depict fixed essences of the world that we can begin to pursue Dewey’s conception of a truly flourishing society: "In \[Dewey's\] ideal society, culture is no longer dominated by the ideal of objective cognition but by that of aesthetic enhancement,” Rorty writes in \*Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature\*, a book he hoped would essentially end the profession of philosophy entirely. “In that culture, as he said, the arts and the sciences would be the 'unforced flowers of life.'" Rorty’s post-philosophical world is one with “more novels and fewer theories,” less of the “theoretical spirit” and more of “the spirit of humor.”Rorty quoting Milan Kundera. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/reggie-fils-if-its-not-fun-why-bother-1.png) 34\. In other words, it is the Kraeplins, the Platos, the Scalias, the Zuckerbergs, and the behaviorists who, in their elevation of essences and literal representation as a primary objective over “aesthetic enhancement,” *keep us from having any fun*. And it is through the infectious agents of their systematic world – spiritually dead avatars, textualism, hyper-expository porn, and seeing madness as only madness – that we deepen our roots in a joyless terrain. --- ## II. The Washout Process 35\. Ultimately, though, as Holmes implied in his maxim, what matters for pragmatists isn’t reaching some notion of Truth, but arriving at an understanding of the world that *works*. Embeddings, literalism, VR avatars, and all other abstractions aside, does our medical model at least provide enough relief from psychic pain that people can cultivate Dewey’s “unforced flowers of life”? Does the medical model accomplish its own goals of remediating psychiatric symptoms? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/bagram.jpg) 36\. As Laing wrote, “An inhuman theory will inevitably lead to inhuman consequences.” Our collective experience reveals that this literalist model has not achieved what it even nominally sets out to. Given the track record of what happens when we productize this model, this shouldn’t be surprising; the univariate, more-is-more, just-as-it-is approach that defines projects guided by this model is fatal to each of their putative objectives. Spotify, in removing every last barrier of exposure to music, has accordingly devalued music so much that it can’t turn a profit; SaaS productivity startups that promised to facilitate workflows by increasing the software integration load of companies have all gone bust since they didn’t actually improve anything; the obscenely expensive Lockheed Martin F-35 that leads our Air Force can’t shoot straight, operating as just one more piece of novelty-obsessed, malfunctioning miltech that has led the United States to become a full-time loser of conflicts post-Cold War; and the greater autonomy promised by ever larger domestic vehicles has resulted in absolutely no psychological respite from the prison of American roads. 37\. Medical psychiatry is no different. So how can we measure this failure? One place to start is with the often unrecognized blowback from the industry’s crusade to remove the “stigma” of mental illness by linking madness to brain-based disorders. Research demonstrating as much dates back to at least the 1963, when researchers [found](https://www.proquest.com/openview/3de25d6ecd4081a42e9f0e72f72c56d4/1?ref=components.news) that job interviewees were evaluated more favorably if they attributed their prior psychiatric hospitalizations to interpersonal problems than to illness. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/shock-harshness.jpg) 38\. In 1997, researchers from Auburn University and the University of Connecticut [cconducted](https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdf/10.1521/jscp.1997.16.4.405) a study in which students were paired with partners they were told belonged to one of three groups: a “normal” group with no psychiatric history, a “psychosocial” group whose psychiatric history was attributed to family and relationships, and a “medical” group whose psychiatric history was attributed to having “a disease like any other”.The partners’ designations were fabricated and randomly assigned; any real-life psychiatric histories or lackthereof had no bearing on their categories in the study. The students then had to guide their partners to solve a memory problem where they selected tiles in a specific order, delivering an electric shock if they got the sequence wrong. While the medical group was blamed less for their failures in the task, they received more powerful shocks than the other two groups. "This study provides little support for the widespread belief among mental health professionals that regarding the mentally disordered as sick will promote greater acceptance and more favorable treatment,” the authors wrote. “Perhaps we should reconsider the wisdom of perpetuating such a firm stance on the best way to characterize mental disorder." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/social-distance.jpg) 39\. Following up on these results in 2003, researchers from the University of Leipzig [surveyed](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1080/j.1440-1614.2004.01363.x?ref=components.news) respondents in four regions – East Germany, West Germany, Russia, and Mongolia – to measure how respondents perceive people suffering from schizophrenia or depression based on the etiology of the condition. When people associated the conditions with biological causes, they also expressed more desire for social distance from the afflicted individuals. "Attributing the causes to socialization results in a reduction of the social distance desired," they wrote. Turkish researchers [discovered](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2004-12949-005?ref=components.news) the same aversion to people whose distress is medicalized the following year. 40\. But the blowback against the campaign to destigmatize through medicalization pales in comparison to the consequences yielded by the treatment that medicalization necessitates. To my knowledge, the most comprehensive account of this phenomenon remains Robert Whitaker’s 2010 book *Anatomy of an Epidemic*, which will evoke anything between warm recognition and violent animus from those familiar with the title. In 2015, I interviewed Whitaker in his office in Cambridge, MA., where he told me about his trajectory from working as a journalist for the *Boston Globe* to becoming the Director of Publications for Harvard Medical School to gradually blackpilling himself in the Harvard library by poring over piles of studies on the pathology-inducing effects of psychopharmacology. 41\. *Anatomy* is an attempt to reconcile a paradox: Why, amid the explosion of supposedly life-saving psychopharmacology, have disability rolls for mental illness in the United States skyrocketed, going from 1 in 184 Americans in 1987 to 1 in 76 in 2007? Why did those rolls increase for children thirty-five fold while they declined for every other cause? Amid this renaissance of treatment, why have people seemed to get sicker and sicker? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/disability-claims.jpg) 42\. Whitaker’s argument is that the drugs are not simply correlative, but causal: that psychopharmacology as practiced in the United States renders episodic illnesses into chronic ones, that psychiatric treatment instantiates a disease process whose ramifications are attributed to the patient’s own psychopathology – that the perverse irony of identifying madness as a medical illness is that it induces actual medical illness. It reduces a libidinal, defiant McMurphy into his post-electroconvulsive self – but, in Foucauldian fashion, it often does so in a way that is nearly impossible to identify, subtly pathologizing the patient more and more via pharmacology and assigning responsibility for the deleterious outcomes to the patient themself. 43\. *Anatomy* includes studies on the long-term pathologies wrought by pharmacological treatment for nearly every class of psychiatric drug, from antidepressants to anxiolytics – the iatrogenic development of rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, treatment-resistant depression, supersensitivity psychosis, post-benzo syndrome, and so on. But one study in particular best condenses the book’s thesis into a single set of data and reflects medical psychiatry’s inability to grapple with the ramifications of its methods. 44\. In 2007, Martin Harrow, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois Chicago, published a 15-year [study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17502806/?ref=components.news) on the divergent outcomes of people admitted to hospitals in Chicago for schizophrenia or other forms of psychosis. In the fifteen-year period, Harrow’s team checked in with the patients five times and assessed their long-term outcomes on a number of metrics, including their relapse into psychosis or other symptoms, their ability to support themself, exist among their community and family, work, avoid hospitalization, and so on. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/harrow-figure-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/harrow-figure-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/harrow-figure-4.jpg) 45\. On every measure, the unmedicated group performed better than the medicated one. The group that remained off the meds was rehospitalized at a lower rate, had better “global functioning,” more favorable prognosis, and experienced psychosis significantly less frequently. 46\. However, Harrow’s interpretation of the data deflected against attributing the divergent outcomes to medication, instead attributing them to the patients’ own predispositions. As he wrote, the non-medicated group’s “more favorable outcome is associated with internal characteristics of the patients, including better premorbid developmental achievements, favorable personality and attitudinal approaches, less vulnerability, greater resilience, and favorable prognostic factors.” In other words, medications didn’t cause worse long term outcomes, it was simply that more resilient patients were able to avoid medications in the first place. 47\. Critics of Whitaker seized on his decontextualized use of the study in his thesis. The most common and focused critique of *Anatomy* in medical journals was that Whitaker misinterpreted the data in a way at odds with Harrow’s own conclusion, which they portrayed as a jumble of correlation and causation that infected the entire argument. One reviewer said Whitaker’s use of the study to support his thesis involved “tortured logic.” 48\. Whitaker attended the 2008 American Psychiatric Association annual meeting in Washington DC to ask Harrow about his conclusion. After Harrow gave a talk about his findings at the conference, Whitaker was granted a brief press interview. Harrow again explained the divergent outcomes in patients’ predispositions to recovery, telling Whitaker “it was those who did better \[initially\] who then went off the medications.” “When I pressed on with a question about whether his findings supported a different interpretation,” Whitaker wrote in *Anatomy*, “which was that the drugs worsened long-term outcomes, he grew a bit testy. ‘That’s a possibility, but I’m not advocating it,’ he said.” 49\. In August of 2015, I called Harrow,This interview, and the interview with Whitaker, were originally conducted for an article that was never published. who at the time was 93 years old and retired (he died last year). I asked if he remembered the meeting. “I didn’t know it was him,” he told me. “Now he may have introduced himself at the time...but I didn’t realize it was the guy who wrote the book \*Mad in America\* \[Whitaker’s previous book on psychiatry\]. He asked me very reasonable questions and I answered them straightforward. A little bit I tried to slant them favorably towards the meds if anything.” 50\. I asked Harrow why he framed the results of the data as causally unrelated to the drugs. “Medically to get it accepted, we made excuses for it, because it’s not a popular view in the field,” he said. “We didn’t want to frighten the editor.” 51\. Let’s assume that Harrow meant what he said in this interview, and that Whitaker *didn’t* misinterpret the results of a longitudinal study showing that long-term exposure to psychiatric medication yields worse long-term outcomes in people’s lives, inducing a chronicity in their condition and leading to worse scores on a host of psychosocial metrics. If that’s true, then the criticism most strongly wielded to undercut Whitaker’s argument – that the evidentiary *piece de resistance* was misapplied – is mostly defused. Therefore, the proliferation of these medications –- often at high dosages, in combination with other drugs, and for treatment periods that are more or less indefinite – has wreaked a population-level effect on our society. 52\. The inevitable question is, *What does that effect look like on an individual level?* From the vantage of the behavioralist practitioner, the effect of drug treatment looks identical to mental illness itself. The very absence of objective, physiological diagnostic criteria for mental illness allows prescribers to escape accountability for the virtually untestable adverse effects of their treatments. Because the behaviors (observable and therefore putatively objective) of adverse drug events and what might simply be referred to as “normal psychopathology” can closely mimic one another, the latter is not merely mistaken for the former. Rather, the behavioralist perspective allows for no distinction to begin with, as outward displays or patient reports of distress are flattened into merely distressing behavior, warranting still further treatment. In other words, the suppression of experience in favor of behavior as the primary material under examination allows the nature of these undesirable outcomes to evade full examination. 53\. But as former and current patients can attest, these experiences are \*not\* the same. The anhedonia and sexual dysfunction induced by SSRIs and their sometimes protracted withdrawal is not synonymous with their chiral forms in depression. One of the more interesting observations others have made, that I wish I could claim to have made first, is that the surge of asexual identity in our culture is at least partly related to this pharmacologic saturation. Benzodiazepines can instantiate what outwardly appears as an intense anxiety and generalized malaise but to the patient is a neuropsychiatric malfunction without precedent in their life. Patients on antipsychotics can develop a flatness that inverts itself into psychosis or mania whose intensity and longevity outstrips that of the original madness. And on and on throughout the pharmacopeia. 54\. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this dynamic is almost universally overlooked in television, film, literature, and most any other media in favor of what we might call the reversion-to-the-original narrative. In this narrative, a patient on psychiatric medication ceases treatment and shortly thereafter reverts to their prior, pre-medicated self, unblemished by their pharmacological exposure. If they were sick before, their sickness returns in its original form. If they were well before, they regain their original wellness. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/garden-state.jpg) 55\. A collection of archaic references from the aughts and 2010s comes to mind. In the now nearly forgotten HBO series *Six Feet Under*, the manic depressive Billy throws out his lithium and immediately succumbs to a wild spending spree followed by debilitating depression. A similar arc plays out in *Homeland* after the CIA agent Carrie stops taking her mood stabilizers. In *Garden State* – arguably still the most iconic reversion-to-the-original narrative produced – Zach Braff, swept away by a whimsical Natalie Portman, quits his cocktail of psych meds cold turkey and immediately rediscovers his capacity for grief, aliveness, etc., culminating in the movie’s climactic primary existential scream in the rain. 56\. In the real world, a sudden withdrawal from polypharmacy would certainly leave Zach Braff screaming, but hardly with the same vital catharsis. But if withdrawal syndromes, chronicity, and all the other bad long-term outcomes are starkly manifest in data, what complicates our ability to depict them aesthetically? There is a concrete discrepancy between our empirical and our cultural perception. And it is arguably this very discrepancy that has perpetuated the epidemic in question. 57\. What we need more than further studies, then, are more individuations of this disease process that produces bad long-term outcomes. So long as these outcomes remain quantitative abstractions unrooted from our day-to-day experience of the world, these studies may as well not exist at all. How can we link what we know happens with what we see? How can we reinflate the flattened distinction between madness and emergent pathologies induced by the treatments themselves? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/wallace.jpg) 58\\. The story of David Foster Wallace canonized in D.T. Max’s biography, \*Every Love Story is a Ghost Story\*, and in \*Rolling Stone\* writer David Lipsky’s reporting, is a reversion-to-the-original narrative. This narrative, in its broadest strokes, goes as follows: Wallace begins to experience a crippling depression while a sophomore at Amherst College in the early 1980s. He and everyone around him frame this depression in its unembedded, just-as-it-is form — as Max writes, “Wallace was beginning to understand things that had either never been told to him before or that he was only now ready to hear: that he had a biological condition that was with him for the rest of his life.” While an MFA student in Arizona, Wallace experiences another episode of depression following a breakup and begins treatment with the early generation antidepressant Nardil.An MAO inhibitor. After suffering dangerously high blood pressure from an interaction between Nardil and ingredients in his dinner, Wallace comes off the drug. But taking the opportunity to write unfiltered, he doesn’t immediately switch to a new medication. His depression violently returns and does not relent even after multiple hospitalizations and a kitchen-sink treatment approach. Wallace succumbs to his illness and hangs himself in 2008\. 59\. This reversion-to-the-original interpretation remains plausible if the examination stops at this rough outline; it becomes implausible once we parse its more banal details. And it is the process of parsing those details that we encounter the very reason why aesthetic depiction of the epidemic feels nearly impossible to capture. 60\. Wallace’s depression as an Amherst student was initially treated with the drug Tofranil.A tricyclic antidepressant. It is unclear in Max’s biography how long he remained on that drug before his depression returned while an MFA student at Arizona. But when it did, he was placed on Nardil. Four years after he started on Nardil, Wallace returned to Amherst to teach. He began drinking heavily, using Xanax, and watching television for hours a day, the raw materials from which \*Infinite Jest\* was ultimately formed. He and his fiance ended their engagement; he spiraled until he was admitted to an alcohol and drug recovery program. 61\. During an early attempt at recovery in the late 1980s, as part of an enterprise towards sobriety and away from all chemicals, Wallace got off the Nardil for the first time. He sunk lower, became haggard and withdrawn, tried to kill himself, and eventually attempted to get back on the drug, but to no avail. As Max writes, “The same psychiatrist who had prescribed Nardil for him the first time put him back on the drug, but it did not have the same effect…The Nardil didn’t stabilize Wallace and his psychiatrists recommended electro-convulsive therapy.” 62\\. Wallace underwent six courses of ECT, followed by a period of stability. He published \*The Girl with Curious Hair\* and enrolled as a philosophy graduate student at Havard. He came to immediately regret his decision to enroll, continued drinking and using drugs, and within a year, told the student health services at Harvard that he wanted to kill himself. He was sent to the storied McLean Hospital, where they urged him in to become sober, and he did, becoming the recovering addictI don’t like this language or this term but there’s no space to forge a new one, this essay is already long enough. that largely defined the rest of his career. 63\. During his early recovery, Wallace begins a relationship with the writer Mary Karr, breaks up with her, and descends again into depression. He checks into another psychiatric hospital, where they increase his dose of Nardil and, as Max writes, “begins to improve." 64\. In the ensuing years, Wallace published *Infinite Jest*, married the artist Karen Green, and became one of the biggest celebrities in the literary world. Throughout, he remained on a high dose of Nardil for two decades. After his hypertensive reaction, he decided to go off the drug. And he experienced a psychopathology whose account marks it as a wholly distinct syndrome from what came before. 65\. During the withdrawal, Wallace wrote to his friend that that he was experiencing “disabling nausea/fatigue,” adding, “I’ve been blowing stuff off and then having it slip my mind…This is the hashest phase of the ‘washout process’ so far; it’s a bit like I imagine a course of chemo would be.” He stopped shaving, lost weight, hollowed out. He was hospitalized and placed on a carousel of drugs that didn’t work. Eventually he tried to get back on the Nardil. But as Lipsky writes, “The Nardil wasn’t working. It can happen with an antidepressant; a patient goes off, returns, and the medication has lost its efficacy.” 66\. “It can happen” implies that there’s an element of dumb luck in whether returning to a drug will work or not. But over decades of use, the brain undergoes conformational changes that induce a dependence not easily broken, and certainly not after the kind of rapid withdrawal Wallace is described as having undergone. As any savvy prescriber and any former psych patient can pinpoint, Wallace’s cold-turkey from Nardil broke every rule in the book about psychiatric drug titration and the glacial pace with which it must take place in order to avoid the most catastrophic results. As Adele Framer notes in her [paper](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2045125321991274?ref=components.news), once these botched withdrawals become protracted, reinstatement of the original drug may no longer be an option. 67\. And so we have a depression once episodic, reactive, inflamed by drugs and alcohol and break-ups and ameliorated by sobriety and relationships and literary success, morph into a disease of unprecedented virulence, untreatable, idiopathic in origin, and completely unremitting. In other words, we have the exact contours of Whitaker’s epidemic. And we have no way of conveying this with the same brevity carried by that of a writer simply so depressed that he couldn’t endure the world. We instead have diagrams, exhibits, mind-numbingly meticulous comparisons of drug regimens and symptom comparisons — an argument made of insoluble fiber. 68\. Nine years ago, when I raised this possibility to Max, he dismissed it outright, telling me he saw no reason to believe that Wallace’s treatment bore any responsibility for the end of his life. (Whitaker was more straightforward, telling me simply, “Of course that’s what happened.”) Perhaps this is because Max believes so strongly in the medical model he can’t fathom another possibility. But perhaps he is also expressing a general aversion to the idea of something so exogenous impinging on a coherent biography, as if being killed by Nardil were as meaningless and absurd as Wallace being killed by eating dinner. As the biography stands, Wallace is the victim of his own headstrong desire for literary purity, undone by his unwillingness to accept his biological limitations and aching for an unfettered artistic mind, ultimately destroying himself in the process. This biography allows Wallace to be a tragic figure, with a tragic flaw — it allows his life to be a work of art that being a pharmacological casualty would deny. 69\. So we are left with a work of art pitted against an insoluble pile of evidence; we still have only data and no prose, unless we can rearrange that evidence into something new. 70\. My attempt to do so is to suggest that Wallace’s pharmacologically-induced suicide was not an aberration incurring on his life — it was its very consummation. As he wrote in *Infinite Jest*, “\[A\] little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you.” Wallace could perceive to a certain extent that alcohol and television shared a common addictive DNA that defined American life. But that perception was too limited for him, or his biographer, to grasp that DNA’s full malignance, to understand that the fictionalization of the enslaving substances was Wallace unwittingly outlining his own cause of death. 71\. But having arrived where we have, it’s more important to consider why the grip of Wallace’s work seemed to slacken within a decade after his death — why the shelf-life of one of the biggest celebrities in American literary history seemed to expire barely a decade after he did. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/trillaphon.jpg) 72\. One of Wallace’s first stories, published while a student at Amherst, was titled “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to The Bad Thing.” The Bad Thing is the semi-autobiographical college student narrator’s word for what the doctor diagnoses as “severe clinical depression.” The narrator describes the sensations of The Bad Thing, the aching sickness he feels, and so on. To the narrator, this Bad Thing has no origin. It just is. And as the narrator comes to realize, the fact that the Bad Thing simply is parallels the way that he himself simply is. “\[Y\]ou say to yourself, ‘Boy oh boy, how the heck is the Bad Thing able to do this?’ You think about it — really hard, since it’s in your best interests to do so — and then all of a sudden it sort of dawns on you . . . that the Bad Thing is able to do this to you because *you’re* the Bad Thing yourself! The Bad Thing is you. Nothing else: no bacteriological infection or having gotten conked on the head with a board or a mallet when you were a little kid, or any other excuse; you are the sickness yourself. It is what ‘defines’ you, especially after a little while has gone by…\[Your\] very *essence* is characterized by nothing other than the feature of sickness; you and the sickness are, as they say, ‘one.’” 73\. And so The Bad Thing becomes, as Garson put it, another “empirical fact among other empirical facts,” madness as only madness. Wallace falls on the same side as the behaviorists and the systematic philosophers, where madness is unembedded, just as it is, a fixed essence — something that, as the title of his story makes explicit, one stands in relation to. Wallace did not apprehend what Dewey and Rorty and Laing and all the edifiers could — that you don’t stand in relation to the Bad Thing; the Bad Thing, just like Every Thing, is the relation itself. 74\. We don’t remember the works of art that argue otherwise. We no longer think about *Six Feet Under* because ultimately it doesn’t matter, just like we no longer think about the books of David Foster Wallace or a random empirical fact among other empirical facts. We remember songs, not C#’s. Madness that is only madness doesn’t take root in us because it doesn’t illuminate our embeddedness — and since we are these embeddings, it doesn’t speak to us, about us. But no one strains to recall Raskolnikov’s psychosomatic attacks in *Crime and Punishment* from the guilt of his murder; of King Lear screaming into the storm after his children’s treachery; of A.J. Soprano tying a cinderblock to his leg and throwing himself into the pool, buckling under the weight of the mad world around him. ### "You can touch your music" URL: https://components.news/tactility-and-experience/ Last updated: 2025-10-06T04:27:09.000Z ### Summary This report is the final piece of research about Bandcamp on Components. It finds that the sale of physical objects is strongly positively associated with the amount of money that artists make on the platform, and that among all types of objects sold, this association is strongest with vinyl records. Additionally, the purchase of physical objects becomes increasingly common among buyers as they spend more money overall, with vinyl alone encompassing more sales than all other physical objects combined. In other words, the format is a disproportionately important channel of spending. We use this analysis as a starting point to understand the well documented resurgence in vinyl sales across the broader music industry. Rather than signaling a retro craze or an appetite for collectibles, we argue that a commonly cited reason for purchasing vinyl is more important — that the object is "tactile." This tactility is considered in the context of Marshall McLuhan's understanding of the term as the "synesthetic mode of interplay among the senses," a precondition to existing in a space of experience. We draw upon McLuhan's predecessor, the American pragmatist John Dewey, and argue that people's identification of vinyl's tactility ultimately points to the object's potential for what Dewey understood as aesthetic experience, as contrasted with the un-aesthetic gravitational pull exerted by most forms of streaming. As we have argued in prior work, this form of experience possesses irreducible value, and is thus something people pay for. We further analyze the limitations of overreliance on vinyl as a vessel of this experience, including the affinities between different kinds of music and different formats, and the changing demographics of Bandcamp customers, who increasingly come from countries with lower GDPs and are far less likely to buy vinyl than customers from richer countries. --- Components has been analyzing Bandcamp since late 2020, beginning with our interactive map of cities and the various musical genres they spawn. [The report that followed](https://components.news/bandcamp-the-chaos-bazaar/) in early 2021 examined the company's business model and raised a simple question, one that has become even more relevant in an economy after easy money: Why is Bandcamp profitable and Spotify not? The answer we arrived at was that Bandcamp provides a simple platform for complex transactions, while Spotify is a technically complicated platform for facilitating a single transaction in the form of the one-size-fits-all subscription. Since the completion of those two projects, we have mostly drifted away from Bandcamp and explored other topics, including the warped framework of [consumer technology reviews](https://components.news/the-new-pornographers/) and the nature of true value as [glimpsed](https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/) in the dichotomy between productivity apps and gaming (a subject of imminent relevance to the present report). But if the original Bandcamp thesis boiled down to "simple business model, complex economics," the consequent question that it invites — what are the features of that complexity? — became more irresistible to try to answer as our cache of data from the platform grew to encompass two-and-a-half years' worth of sales activity, today including more than 50 million sales. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/hermes.webp) **Hitler Wears Hermes (side B) by WestSide Gunn* This question was also raised last year when we published a small sidebar piece after Epic Games' acquisition of Bandcamp. That piece contained a graph of the top selling artists from February 2022, showing that the highest earner from the month prior was the rapper WestSide Gunn, when he released his album [Hitler Wears Hermes (side B)](https://daupe.bandcamp.com/album/hitler-wears-hermes-8-side-b?ref=components.news). Gunn's revenue in our data for that month came out to a little more than $260,000 (a number more likely to be under rather than overestimated, a caveat of all dollar figures here). But the rapper not only held the distinction as the month's top selling artist — his top ranking was also notable for owing exclusively to the sale of limited edition physical objects, mostly vinyl, a model employed for all his other releases, as well as for all those of his label, Daupe.Those who actually navigate to this sidebar article and look at the graph will notice that Daupe, the label, is listed as a separate entity. This is because certain kinds of merch in certain scenarios are sold directly under the label's name rather than the artist, even if that is merch for an artist. What this means is that, in the analysis that follows, the revenue of artists that comes from certain merch is sometimes undercounted, since it is assign to the label name itself. An assumption of this report is that, were these revenue sources to be re-coupled, the conclusion here would not significantly differ. Within the entirety of Bandcamp's marketplace, this makes Daupe an anomaly. Artists on Bandcamp almost universally sell digital albums and tracks, with the additional option to purchase physical merch like vinyl, cassette tapes, CDs, and other miscellaneous items like booklets and clothes. From the perspective of Bandcamp's origin — emerging after Radiohead's pay-what-you-want experiment with downloads for *In Rainbows* — this makes sense. But even in our original report on the company, we found that physical items played an outsized role in the site's revenues: The original figures from late 2020 show that physical items, despite comprising less than a quarter of the actual goods sold on the site, make up about half the revenue it generates. The inference from all this — Gunn's placement among top artists and the disproportionate amount of revenue generated from physical sales sitewide — becomes explicit when looking across all artists on the platform. On balance, the more money an artist makes from selling physical stuff, the more money they make overall, which we've measured by their sales rank. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/all-physical-sales.webp) This relationship is not equal among all objects. While there are positive relationships between artists' sales rankings and CDs and merch, and a mostly positive relationship with ranking and tapes (one that drops off among the highest selling artists), the linkage between sales ranking and vinyl sales is the most stark. In other words, in the simplest and most reductive terms, the artists on Bandcamp who are able to move the most vinyl are the ones likely to make the most money, while those whose sales depend most on digital music end up making the least. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/sales-by-format_wide.webp) This trend emerges from the buyer's side as well. To demonstrate this, let's first look at the distribution of how buyer spending breaks down across the site. In our first report we surmised, without looking at any publicly available buyer data, that Bandcamp almost certainly benefited from the Pareto Principle, in which 20% of buyers make up 80% of purchases. As it turns out, this distribution plays out pretty much exactly.The specific dollar figures on the x-axis here shouldn't be taken too literally, but are estimates based on a model that doesn't include any items purchased via subscription, gifts, or other unconventional purchase methods. Instead, the figures are provided here for a sense of tangible grounding. As people spend more money, the share of physical purchases they make keeps climbing. On average, purchases of physical objects by those in the top 20% of buyers generate about 47% of dollars spent in our data, but again, this is certainly an undercount, and the proportions are likely higher.\[^3\] Among that quintile of buyers, vinyl alone comprises about 30% of all money spent, more than tapes, CDs, and other merch combined.Non-musical merch like t-shirts are not included in people's public collections, so this miscellaneous category is underrepresented, which both pulls down the spending on physical purchases overall, and specifically those things in the miscellaneous category. Additionally, any objects that aren't part of a public collection is not included in the model. However, we assume that this discrepancy isn't so great that it would displace vinyl as the primary object, which is ultimately what we're driving at. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/mean-spent-by-format.webp) Why does this particular format channel such a disproportionate amount of money? Sales of vinyl records have been on the rise since 2006, with more than 40 million albums sold last year, generating $1.2 billion in revenue for the music industry, more than double the take from 2019\. Though streaming, which represents 80% of the total market, is dominant, vinyl has become the second most popular format for recorded music and been fully reintegrated into the industry's mainstream. Harry Styles sold 480,000 copies of the vinyl edition of *Harry’s House* in 2022, second only to Taylor Swift, who sold close to a million copies of *Midnights.* The heightened demand for vinyl from fans of the world’s premier popstars has caused serious supply chain issues as the handful of factories that still press records struggle to keep up, but the market is adjusting, with around a dozen new facilities in the pipeline, including pressing plants in California and England slated to open this year. The causes for the resurgence of vinyl have been pored over so thoroughly that one can now sift through them to find any justification they want. Some emphasize the format's sound quality, a position that others argue has little objective merit. Some identify the collectibility of records, others the nostalgic reprieve of the retro in a world whose pace towards an ambiguous, technologized future only seems to accelerate. Some point to the item's inherent scarcity, particularly with limited edition presses like those sold by Westisde Gunn, an interpretation that suggests an appetite for the digitization of the object's essence in the form of NFTs. The collapse of the NFT market amid the steady growth of vinyl sales not only falsifies this explanation, but demonstrates the hazards of the wrong interpretation. But one concept is raised so regularly in the discussion that it effectively sits at the center of the format's discourse, a quality that seemingly no one disputes. As one college student [expressed](https://www.axios.com/2021/09/17/vinyl-sales-growth-music-industry?ref=components.news) in 2021 when explaining their affinity for vinyl, "I’m using streaming basically 24/7, but having records has been a way of making my favorite music tactile." --- When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he began his pitch of the device's capabilities with a seemingly novel feature: "You can touch your music,” he said with palpable glee. “You can just touch your music. It's so cool."What Jobs literally meant was that iPhones had touchscreens, songs on the iTunes store came with album art, and you navigated between these songs with your finger by touching the pictures. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/touch-your-music.webp) But Jobs's delivery is notable for two reasons. First, his giddiness, even if marketing affect, demonstrates that it *would* be incredible to touch your music — the hitherto untouchable — so much so that it might prompt you to buy a first gen iPhone. Second, and more importantly, this very ability reaches its nadir with the device's cultural saturation. When people say they value vinyl's tactility, when Jobs expresses delight at the idea of touching music — what does this actually refer to? More importantly, why is this valuable? To Marshall McLuhan, tactility was a core concept in the glossary that defined his often bewildering approach in the 1960s to understanding the rise of electronic formats like television. McLuhan framed tactility as more complex than mere physical touch. Instead, it was “that very interplay of the senses which we call synesthesia," a description he deployed variously and repeatedly throughout his work. To McLuhan, tactility involved "a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell." If this sounds a lot like how we experience the world — playing a baseball game or eating a plum or anything else — that's because it is, and the default mode of living is one that is basically tactile. But this then begs the question of what *isn't* tactile. Aren't we always mixing up our senses? If we're not, what exactly are we doing? McLuhan's answer was that we don't do this in what he called "visual space," which was characterized by rationalistic thought processes and media, most notably print, which he asserted amputates the complex interplay of our senses at the expense of one, the "visual", and sands away the tactility with which we had traditionally lived until the arrival of the Gutenberg Press. In this formulation, print reduced our experience of the world to mere alphanumeric characters and logical thought patterns, which could be approached only in a linear, mechanical fashion. This form of engagement, he argued, was the antithesis of both traditional oral communication that had characterized humanity for thousands of years — which involved musicality, the movement of human gestures, and orientation in a physical place — and human nature itself. The result, he argued, is "a ditto device." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/trash.jpg) **Garbage is a common sight in Philadelphia. The tactility of this garbage involves seeing, smelling and maybe even feeling it, a synesthetic mixture that McLuhan argued cannot be captured through one sense alone.* This notion of reducing the senses can be alien on first encounter, so let's use an example. Let's say you wind up in Center City, Philadelphia. You're at 20th and Sansom Streets. It's 90 degrees outside, but amid the defoliated environment of the city, it feels like 105\. You are standing on an intersection that has it all: On the southwest corner, a Shake Shack is foregrounded by a can overflowing with so much garbage that it can be seen from all the way down the block. On the southeast corner, the erection of a soulless glass luxury condo building that has dominated the entire block continues into its 10th year, soundtracked by endless construction noise. On the northeast corner, you see a VC-backed app-based pharmacy with copypasta localized branding ("Hello, Philadelphia"), and on the other, a gourmand eatery selling $30 veggie burgers. A completely spotless, full cab F-150 with a covered bed (never uncovered) and a Blue Lives Matter window decal drives by. You recall that Martin Luther believed we live in hell. You know now that he was right. McLuhan's assertion is that the words used to describe this event will never actually transmit the experience, because the experience itself involves more than merely the eye. Instead, it utilizes the entirety of our sensorium, and that by forcing the experience into "visual space", it is reduced to a mere unfelt set of symbols — a form of non-experience. As the physicist and media scholar Robert Logan (whose tenure at the University of Toronto coincided with McLuhan's) summarized it, "The perceptual bias of visual space is linear, sequential, rational, fragmented, causal…and specialized." On the other hand, what McLuhan dubbed the "acoustic space" that defines our natural interaction with the world is "simultaneous,...intuitive, all embracing, mystical, inductive, and experiential," and is at its basis a space of tactility, of the senses working together to create a gestalt that is more than just the sum of its parts. This might seem somehow both hopelessly abstract and brutally literal at the same time. Does all this simply mean that watching a movie is tactile but looking at a painting isn't? But why would McLuhan specifically cite "the tactile interplay of the senses which painters since Cézanne had stressed as needful" if a painting is a form of visual art? Can't good writing do the same thing? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/mont-saint-victoire.jpg) **A mountain by Cézanne.* The answer McLuhan alluded to was that this tactility is maintained when the content corresponds to a prior synesthesia: > A sphere, for instance, appears to the eye as a flat disk; it is touch which informs us of the properties of space and form. Any attempt on the part of the artist to eliminate this knowledge is futile, for without it he would not perceive the world at all. His task is, on the contrary, to compensate for the absence of movement in his work by clarifying his image and thus conveying not only visual sensations but also those memories of touch which enable us to reconstitute the three-dimensional form in our minds. The tactility of Cézanne's work, therefore, resulted from his ability to evoke the synesthesia involved in a sense of being. One enters the sensorial cavern of the artist’s mind when looking at one of his still lifes, sharing what he experienced on a cognitive level. One sees the painting with more than just their eyes. The challenge becomes that spending too much time with McLuhan results in a labyrinth of complications and contradictions; as one writer [put it](https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-bother-with-marshall-mcluhan?ref=components.news), a chief pitfall when dealing with McLuhan is absorbing him "without a great deal of mastication and, if necessary (and it's often necessary), regurgitation." So let's chew up and spit out a few things. What ultimately matters can be reduced to a few broad strokes: First, let's completely ditch the confusing terms "acoustic space" and "visual space" in favor of "tactile space" and "non-tactile space." Second, let's further say that at the basis of everything in this tactile space are the dynamics of raw experience. And lastly, let's assume that when people say they value vinyl for its tactility, they are situating both the object and their engagement with it somewhere within this realm of experience. In doing so as a flight away from streaming, they are placing streaming somewhere amid a place of non-experience. --- This raises a new ambiguity: what is "experience"? To better try to understand what exactly is happening here, let's step back to an important McLuhan forbearer, the most important American philosopher, and the patron saint of this website, John Dewey. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/DeweySurfing2.webp) **John Dewey surf boarding along the new electronic wave.* McLuhan described Dewey as "surf-boarding along on the new electronic wave," despite Dewey working in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. *The Medium is the Massage* — McLuhan's attempt at creating a quasi-interactive, graphic-centric book that shunned linearity — includes a Dewey quote printed backwards that one must either hold up to a mirror or painstakingly decipher: > Compartmentalization of occupations and interests brings about separation of that mode of activity commonly called "practice" from insight, of imagination from executive doing, of significant purpose from work, of emotion from thought and doing. Each of these has, too, its own place in which it must abide. Those who write the anatomy of experience then suppose that these divisions inhere in the very constitution of human nature. What exactly does this mean? Dewey argued that humans, like all living organisms, operate in the world through the synchronous operation of our sense organs. Our interactions with our environment are so inseparable to our being that in many ways, we are inseparable from the environment itself. This uninterruptible exchange between the environment and our bodies forms reality. By "experience," then, Dewey referred to this active participation in our environments.In his classic example, the tartness of a lemon is neither in the lemon nor in the taster, but in the exchange itself. And by "environment," he included not just the inanimate objects around us, but our social environments as well. "Since sense-organs with their connected motor apparatus are the means of this participation," he wrote, "any and every derogation of them, whether practical or theoretical, is at once effect and cause of a narrowed and dulled life-experience." What exactly does this mean? Dewey argued that humans, like all living organisms, operate in the world through the synchronous operation of our sense organs. Our interactions with our environment are so inseparable to our being that in many ways, we are inseparable from the environment itself. This uninterruptible exchange between the environment and our bodies forms reality. By "experience," then, Dewey referred to this active participation in our environments.In his classic example, the tartness of a lemon is neither in the lemon nor in the taster, but in the exchange itself. And by "environment," he included not just the inanimate objects around us, but our social environments as well. "Since sense-organs with their connected motor apparatus are the means of this participation," he wrote, "any and every derogation of them, whether practical or theoretical, is at once effect and cause of a narrowed and dulled life-experience." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/suburbs.webp) **The suburbs are macro-scale, geographic compartmentalization, and their consequences result in the narrowed and dulled life experience Dewey described.* Dewey believed that the dulling of the exchange with our environments wrought by compartmentalization defined the modernist malaise. This cause and effect can be observed at every level, no matter how far out or close in you zoom. The division "of occupations and interests" manifests in the artificial barrier with which we treat, say, physics and literature, since each is merely a different angle from which to understand an indissoluble whole (i.e., the entire cosmos). A macro, spatial example would be sprawling, rationalistic exurban developments with rigidly demarcated land uses that detach us from our surroundings and our society, shorn of the various types of mixture needed for both society to properly operate, and for us to fully experience anything. According to Dewey, these divisions are absent in childhood — our natural impulse is to mix things up and explore their contours from all angles. In a line later echoed by McLuhan above, he describes "the joy the child shows in learning to use his limbs, to translate what he sees into what he handles, to connect sounds with sights, sights with taste and touch" — the infantile instinct for synesthesia and the tactile space. The artificial separations that define modern life, Dewey said, begin with the reduction of education to rote memorization rather than playful experimentalism, which he viewed as a fundamentally anti-democratic affront to human nature. Dewey argued that education in its non-experiential form — in which knowledge flows unidirectionally from teacher to student, instead of being discovered by the student through exchange with the environment — is a practice of emotionless, brute force information transfer without any demonstrable relevance to the student's world, and that it fails to foster the curiosity he deemed the hallmark of true intelligence. It is essentially a world in which people learn everything about baseball without ever playing or watching a game, where they draw spheres without ever having felt one. When an ornery teen provokes their math teacher to explain why they really need to learn Algebra 2 in the first place, they are in fact throwing down a gauntlet that Dewey believed was of the highest philosophical and moral importance. Because this information doesn't adhere to experience, we end up with McLuhan's "ditto device" — information can be repeated but never re-interpreted, because it is never actually felt from the unique vantage of an individual. (This is how we end up with ["bodies and spaces"](https://components.news/the-production-of-space/) played on repeat). Among the figures produced by this model is what the French sociologist Pierre Bordieu called "the pedant who understands without feeling," and whose paragon is Patrick Bateman, the high-achieving murderous narrator of *American Psycho*. A recurring symbol in the novel is a painting that Bateman owns and talks about to display his taste. At one point, Bateman struggles at a dinner party to demonstrate his personal knowledge of why the painting even matters: > "Well, I think his work... it has a kind of... wonderfully proportioned, purposefully mock-superficial quality." I pause, then, trying to remember a line from a review I saw in *New York* magazine: "Purposefully mock..." Bateman's glitch represents the unfelt second-hand relationship to the world that emerges from a mode of non-experience, an "understanding without feeling" that momentarily fails. The painting functions as an expository prompt, not as a conduit of experience through which his own reaction would emerge spontaneously. It is this same character who describes his nihilism in detail towards the end of the novel, and who confesses, "My pain is constant and sharp." --- It is the contention of this project that behind the continued surge in vinyl sales is a sense of relief from a pain that, if not always sharp, is nearly constant, borne of a nihilistic non-experience that has become even more pervasive under the regime of Silicon Valley. People feel this pain whether they know it or not. But to draw out this assertion, we need to pass through one last Deweyan idea: the concept of "aesthetic experience." If "experience" writ large is the ongoing exchange between ourselves and our environments, then "*an* experience" is when this engagement is demarcated by a beginning and an end. To Dewey, these experiences are aesthetic when they take shape, accumulate, and ultimately consummate — when their different elements build upon one another and refer to each other, and in doing so, imbue each element with *meaning*. In this sense, a logger chopping down a tree, an electrician fixing a house's wiring, two people engaged in a conversation, or even a bird building a nest bears no essential formal difference from the work of a painter or a musician, since in all cases, the basic dynamic is the same: In each of them, the elements of the experience bind together "into a single whole," and their "varied parts are linked to one another, and do not merely succeed one another." This single whole is also bound together by an emotional current. Dewey gives the example of a person setting out to clean their room: Performed as an automatic habit with little conscious thought, the experience is not aesthetic in nature. But when propelled by a mental charge — like a sudden need to impose a sense of order on one's life, or amid a drug binge — the experience becomes emotionally unified. Art, then, reflects this form of experience, and *is* experience, just as experience itself is essentially art (hence the title of Dewey’s treatment of the subject, *Art as Experience*). To Dewey, art involves a series of experiential steps. The artwork begins through primary experience, like a painter experiencing a field or a musician experiencing the DMV. This is followed by the artist embodying that experience into "aesthetic form," like a painting, a song, etc. The audience of this work then has their own aesthetic experience of the work, in that as they see/hear/read it, each part builds upon what came before and what will come after (in this sense, Dewey believed *all* art was temporal, including forms like photographs, as one engages with the work's different elements over a period of time that are not all at once apparent). Dewey gives the example of Hamlet's last words, "The rest is silence": taken on their own, the words mean nothing, but seen in the context of the rest of the play, they are not only imbued with meaning, but imbue everything else that came before them with new meaning as well. "In a work of art," he wrote, just as in aesthetic experience itself, "different acts, episodes, occurrences melt and fuse into unity." Dewey contrasted this with what he called (in his archaic spelling) "non-esthetic" or "anesthetic" experiences, which he described as having "slackness of loose ends" marked by "deviations in the opposite directions from the unity of experience": > Things happen, but they are neither definitely included nor decisively excluded; we drift. We yield according to external pressure, or evade and compromise. There are beginnings and cessations, but no genuine initiations and concludings. One thing replaces another, but does not absorb it and carry it on. There is experience, but so slack and discursive that it is not an experience. Needless to say, such experiences are anesthetic. This is our argument: The tactility people identify in records is not simply an acknowledgement of the object's raw physicality, but of the object's experiential, and ultimately aesthetic, nature. This occurs on two levels. The first involves playing the record itself: A person begins with a mental charge to play a record, they walk to where the record is, they pull it out of its sleeve, they put it on the turntable, the turntable plays the record, and then the record eventually stops — an initiation and a concluding involving one's physical environment. In between this initiation and concluding, *something happens*, whether that is actively listening to the music, mopping the floor, or having a conversation. In other words, there is the aesthetic experience of the music itself, and there is the aesthetic structure of experience molded by the listener's intentional initiation of that music in the environment, and its cessation. But this has to be squared with the statistic that only [half](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/50-of-vinyl-buyers-dont-own-a-record-player-data-shows/?ref=components.news) of vinyl buyers actually own a turntable. Maybe this statistic is accurate, and maybe it isn't. Regardless, it brings us to the second and more important level: The experience *of the object itself*. A record is never just unadorned black wax — it is album art conceived with the music, stylized liner notes with lyrics, credits, and so on, and one experiences them in the same aesthetic way Dewey said we experience a painting: we approach it from a distance, we perceive the context in which the painting exists, we explore its surface and allow its various elements to become one as those elements are absorbed, and we (ideally) have some cumulative, unifying reaction throughout the process until our perception of the painting culminates. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/ict-t-front.webp) **Take, for instance, this record. One sees it in a record store while flipping through other records. They select it from the stack, pull it out, and examine it, holding it in their hands and allowing their eyes to run over the figures and text on the cover. As they examine the object, they discover that the people on the cover are embossed and the light reflects this three-dimensionality.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/ict-t-back.webp) **They continue to explore the object, flipping it over, discovering that the back of the figures are visible and embossed as well. This experience might continue further if the record were opened, or it can cease once the album is put back in the stack. This memory of experience with the object becomes inseparable from experience with the music itself, even if they were to stream the album later.* But a record provides an additional dimension to this process. On the very basic assumption that even those listeners who don't own a turntable have at least experienced the music in another format — such as streaming — then this object is navigated with heightened sensorial interplay, in which the experience of the music and the experience of the object become inextricable from one another: one hears the album art, one reads the sound, and so on. It's through "the synesthetic interplay of the senses" that seemingly disparate elements can, in Dewey's words, "melt and fuse into unity." Like seeing the Ceźanne painting with more than one's eyes, they hear the music with more than their ears. It should be stated outright that streaming does not necessarily disrupt all aesthetic potential, and each of us have certainly had potent musical experiences using it — in fact, the people who don't have record players and buy vinyl most certainly have. But these experiences are not what the format is after. Instead, it is optimized to be the paradigmatically anaesthetic medium in which "one thing replaces another, but does not absorb it and carry it on." The specific mechanisms by which streaming optimizes for this are obvious to any person who would make it this far in this essay. In order for this endless drift to continue (which, as has been noted, is precisely what Spotify wants), streaming necessarily needs music to become anti-tactile, heard only with the ears. It needs, as one author was recently quoted as saying in a widely circulated [essay](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n09/daniel-cohen/to-monopolise-our-ears?ref=components.news) about Spotify, to essentially sit "below the threshold of listener awareness." In other words, in its most ideal form, streaming renders music into a single-sense input, with no synesthetic interplay. One cannot occupy the entirety of their sensorium with streamed music from morning to night. Because streaming wants anaesthetic experience from its listener, it requires anaesthetic music, which requires music that embodies no experience from the musician to begin with, both in its production and its inspiration, involving non-experience at every step. Since it emerges from this non-experiential space, it becomes the musical form of McLuhan's "ditto device", whose endless, facile reproducibility is demonstrated in the 49,000 songs uploaded to the platform every day, many by [fake artists](https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-fake-artists-problem-is-much), calibrated to maximize playlist placement. The natural progression to cut costs on this sonic ditto device, it goes without saying, leads to purely generative music:By which we mean purely generated music; we are not referring to every last thing anyone might ever do with any generative model at any point in any step of any production process, however we are referring to most of what you would imagine Sound goes into the model for training, and sound comes out of the model, resulting in a non-tactile, literally single-sense music, equally experience-less in its production as in its reception. But there's still one last question: Why exactly do we assign greater monetary value to the thing that provides aesthetic experience? The short answer is that this form of experience is the immutable bedrock of all there is, the fulfillment of Freud's "prehistoric wish," of Nietzsche's aesthetic phenomenon that eternally justifies existence, the irreducible goal that we're all after, the end. The long answer — well, we spent 7,000 words on [the long answer](https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/) last year, which you can read some other time. Right now, we have more data to get through. --- All this might seem like a self-indulgent excursion away from an otherwise straightforward conclusion: if people spend more money on vinyl records, that's what artists and labels should push, regardless of the true meaning of tactility, John Dewey's philosophy, or anything else. But as we saw with NFTs, learning the wrong lessons from vinyl's resurgence can lead to disaster (and maybe make you diabolical). And as we're about to see, de-literalizing the meaning of vinyl's popularity is necessary to circumvent the format's limitations, and to make those lessons as widely applicable as possible. First, and perhaps most obviously to anyone trying to press an LP, producing vinyl has become more expensive. That trend appears in the average price paid for the format on Bandcamp over the past couple of years. (The change is not due to increasing generosity of buyers electing to pay more over the minimum for vinyl, a rate that has remained almost completely stable for physical goods across this time.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/change-in-price.webp) The second obstacle is that music is not format agnostic, and the ability to package different kinds of music into different formats reflects the kind of complexity that Spotify is unable to deal with in its Procrustean, one-size-fits-all platform. While vinyl has been surprisingly sellable to fans of a certain Ableton-ish sound that is engineered primarily to be streamed (Taylor Swift's *Midnights* being the largest example), forcing all types of music into one physical format can result in that format becoming generic and incongruent. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/format-genres.webp) Third, and perhaps most interestingly, people from richer countries are more likely to buy almost every single format, including digital albums but especially vinyl, than poorer countries. The exception is for individual tracks, whose relationship between GDP is almost as inversely strong as that between GDP and vinyl. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/formats-by-GDP_wide.webp) However, the people from those countries that lean towards tracks take up a larger share of Bandcamp's customer base, which has undergone a fairly substantial shift away from the richer countries that previously provided the bulk of its buyers. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/gdp-over-time_wide.webp) Given all this — the expense of vinyl production, the dissonance between the format and certain genres, the shifting demographics of music buyers, and the posited necessity of tactility to value in a music economy — where does this leave us with regards to re-injecting tactility into the various means of musical conveyance? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/k-pop.webp) One is to simply create new kinds of physical goods or stretch the potential of existing ones. For example, CDs have maintained a staggering level of popularity in South Korea and Japan over the course of the digital revolution and vinyl resurgence, representing the largest share of music sales in both countries. K-pop labels in particular have gone further and embraced the idea that physical recordings are their own sort of merch by packaging CDs in thick, high-quality books that contain art and song lyrics, presenting the listener with much more material to pore over and providing the work with ever greater surface area. Japanese artists have [bundled](https://www.reuters.com/article/japan-music-idINKBN27Q0GV?ref=components.news) "CD singles and albums with perks for pop idol fans, including vouchers for priority concert ticket purchases and invitations to handshake events." The country's tight restrictions on Covid led to scaling back such events, which resulted in a consequent drop in CD sales. There are also emerging methods that involve ways to straddle the physical and the digital. The KANO Stem Player is one interesting proposition. A palm-sized disc with an entirely haptic interface, the music player has four grooves on its surface that allow the user to independently control the stems — individual tracks for vocals, instrumentals, and so on— of a given song.Stems are one of the few legitimate uses of AI in music that have been showcased anywhere. By sliding a finger or tapping, individual components of the song can be isolated or emphasized, and the listener can even loop a stem or apply an effect. In blurring the line between listening to music and making it, the device engages the listener in Deweyan experimental transactions with the music itself, introduces an additional layer of aesthetic activity, and pulls listeners out of the drifting passivity that defines music in non-experiential space. If nothing else, the device acts as an interesting concept car for a lot of what we've said here, regardless of whether it turns out to be a viable product in the long run. And then there are the attempts to bring physical performance and presence into digital space. The potential of gaming environments to foster this kind of tactility beyond that of any other electronic medium has already been embraced by musicians.People who have never spent substantial time playing Grand Theft Auto 5 assume that the game's Westworld-type Anything Goes sandbox is what launched it to its status as the best-selling video game in history. That's partly true, but what almost certainly deserves more credit is the game's ability to transmit with startling accuracy the experience of driving in Los Angeles while listening to music, one of the greatest ways to experience recorded music ever devised and probably the single most fun thing to do in America. Bandcamp owner Epic Games, the maker of \*Fortnite\*, has lobbed a few attempts at this with its in-game concerts of artists like Marshmello, but those efforts are — well, they're bad and stupid for all the reasons a \*Fortnite\* Marshmello concert would be, but they also are plagued by the limitations of what everyone who begrudgingly joined a friend's Zoom concert experienced during the pandemic. \*Fortnite\* might suck, but it's still a game, and a game's power lies, as with all experience, in the exchange between the game's environment and its player, something that ossifies when that exchange is reduced to hopping around while a colossal, prerecorded Travis Scott lumbers about \*Fortnite's\* Disney-toned killing fields. An opposite example more closely aligned with our thesis is the bubbling popularity of virtual reality clubs, although this option, which requires a VR-capable gaming rig, is obviously prohibitively expensive for many. The point isn't to enumerate every possibility, but to identify that these methods are themselves innumerable. But superseding any of these consumer goods is a question of both culture and policy for how to facilitate people actually hearing other people play music, or play it themselves, in the flesh, the foundation for how we perceive music in any format. The musician Jaime Brooks summarized this importance in an [interview](https://finals.blog/posts/An-Interview-with-Jaime-Brooks?ref=components.news) earlier this year: > When I was in my, like, early 20s, in Minneapolis I posted things on Craigslist about wanting to start a band…And it worked! I met people that way…I was out experiencing music with people every weekend. There was this big, open, weird, chaotic possibility space that I felt like I could tap into…And it was a communal experience…I think everyone should be able to access some version of that...I think that if people were just doing it more in-the-room together, if that wasn't so difficult and expensive to make happen. If people were doing that part of the process in school consistently, before being turned loose onto social media as an aspiring teenage producer or artist or whatever, I think it would be better…I think the rent issue is the biggest thing keeping that from happening. It's just too hard to physically get space for people to be doing this, and still be able to make money off of it. Nothing we can write about here is a solution for macroeconomic problems, none of them will make housing and other space affordable, none of them will keep the possibility of medical bankruptcy at bay, and none of them are able to replace the significance of fumbling around trying to place a bass or a saxophone or a drum machine when you're 15, and being in a room and listening to those who actually can. But if the ways to foster tactility and experience are innumerable, so are the ways not to. We'll mention just one: As with everything else, it comes courtesy of Spotify, in its recent [attempt](https://www.thurrott.com/music-videos/spotify/280284/spotify-launches-a-major-redesign-with-home-screen-previews?ref=components.news) to create a pseudo-TikTok homepage in which 10-second clips of music videos play on repeat during truncated "preview" clips of a song. Of all the innumerable examples, this one matters for the same reason Steve Jobs's promise that you could touch your music does: It acknowledges on some level that tactility, that "fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell," is a phenomenon of paramount significance. And like Jobs, it hasn't the slightest idea what that actually means. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/lux-records.webp) Throughout the research and writing of this project, a scene from Sofia Coppola’s *The Virgin Suicides* continuously presented itself as a mental banner under which the report was completed. In the scene, the 17-year-old ingenue Lux Lisbon has sex with the heartthrob quarterback Trip Fontaine on the school's football field while the rest of the school is at the homecoming dance. Abandoned by Trip afterwards, she spends the night sleeping on the field, breaking the curfew imposed by her mother that was a nonnegotiable condition for her and her sisters to go out, and instigating a crackdown that permanently confines all the girls to their home. In the film's most wrenching scene, Lux's mother punishes her by forcing her to burn her records. Lux sobs with the abandon of any separation trauma as she forces herself to drag them down the staircase and throw them into the fire, pleading to not have to burn her Aerosmith LP, until the house fills with smoke and her mother, a stoic midwestern tyrant, tosses the crate's unburned remainder into the garbage bin. The duality between the paradigms of experience and non-experience, and the sets of antithetical goods they produce, has preoccupied Components since 2020\. [One](https://components.news/faucets-of-despair/) produces Scorsese, the other viewer-optimized binge content. [One](https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/) produces *Pikmin*, the other Monday.com. One is rooted in place, the other in no place in particular. One creates the things we'd cry to see thrown in the fire, the other a trillion replicas to which we are more or less indifferent. To declare that one corresponds to life and the other death would not be an exaggeration, but it would also require another essay. So instead we'll just say this: Love — of a place, a person, an LP, *Pikmin* — doesn't take place outside the framework of experience. It is tactile, and it is aesthetic. That Silicon Valley has provided us with the anaesthetic and non-tactile is why it so often leaves us with nothing to care about much at all. And it's why it has so much trouble working out the kinks of getting us to pay for it. *Thanks to* [*Jameson Orvis*](https://twitter.com/pspspswjt?ref=components.news) *and* [*Heather Mease*](https://www.hmmease.com/?ref=components.news) *for their help throughout this project.* ### The GDPR ransomware attack on Components URL: https://components.news/the-gdpr-ransomware-attack-on-components/ Last updated: 2025-10-01T18:22:36.000Z A ransomware attacker hit Components' MongoDB database, which is used to store the data used in our analyses, in mid-December. While checking the status of a migration from one server to another, I found that suddenly, everything on the new server was gone except a single newly created database titled `READ__ME_TO_RECOVER_YOUR_DATA`, containing the following note (typos included): > All your data was backed up from your server. You need to email us at \[EMAIL\]@onionmail.org to recover your data. If you dont contact us we will reach the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, and notify them that you store user data in an open form that is not safe. Under the rules of the law, you face a heavy fine or arrest and your database dump will be deleted from our server forever! As it turns out, this specific attack has been ongoing since at least 2020, when it is estimated to have hit nearly half of all MongoDB instances, numbering about 23,000\. The added twist to this particular attack is the way the note leverages the fuzzy boundaries of Europe's data protection law, a set of regulations so vast that it can often be difficult to know whether or not one has legitimately run afoul. I know I'm not the only one who reacted with this same mixture of dread, and despite this very attack hitting many tens of thousands of servers, I have come across very little actionable information answering questions about how it happened and whether attackers actually got any data. Instead, nearly everything I've discovered has come either in the form of vapid tech journalism that does little more than acknowledge its very existence, or armchair lawyers and infosec larpers confidently issuing bald misinformation on Reddit. So I'd like to do three things here: Provide some answers to potentially exigent questions for anyone who has just faced such an attack, explain how this happened to me and likely how it happened to a good portion of other MongoDB administrators, and once again take aim at the perennially useless institution of tech journalism. ## Did the attackers get any data? The single useful piece of information I found on this attack absolutely anywhere came from Samuel Clay, who [experienced the same attack](https://blog.newsblur.com/2021/06/28/story-of-a-hacking/?ref=components.news) in June 2021 when doing maintenance on his news reader, NewsBlur. I can't thank him enough for providing the commands needed to sift through the massive Mongo log files so I could arrive at the same conclusion he did: The attackers almost certainly made off with nothing. (Also, this post inadvertently follows the header structure of his own somewhat closely.) Like Sam, looking for logins directly to the MongoDB itself from unknown IP addresses revealed a connection from a Tor exit node, a \`dropDatabase\` command about one second later, and a disconnection one more second later — far less time than would be necessary to download the dozens of gigabytes stored in the database. From the standpoint of the threat actor, such efficiency makes sense. First, it's important to keep in mind that hitting tens of thousands of servers requires an automated script that scans the internet for IPs linked to Mongo databases, and is therefore totally agnostic about what kind of data it's hitting. Actually downloading entire databases would place major speed bumps in front of the attack to hit as many instances as possible — it adds risk and decreases efficiency, with nearly no upside. Second, it would require the attack model to include resources to actually store that data. And third, it would increase the attacker's connection time and make them more vulnerable to detection, precluding them from deleting what's there and leaving their bluff note. Of course, that data is gone, and unless you've backed it up, you're not getting it back. But the specter of it winding up in malicious hands or under European review (an already risible idea when one considers threat actors dutifully filling out GDPR complaint forms to make good on their threats, something I genuinely considered in my delirium) is almost certainly a nonissue. ## How did this happen? What perplexed me was how the attackers were actually able to access the server, a question that also perplexed one user on [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31010892&ref=components.news) in April 2022: > This week I got my mongodb instances hacked two times. Since it is a test database there is no damage. But my question is how it possible? I've setup a unique password for my db? If the hacker can figure out my password, is it not possible they can hack every other accounts on the internet too? I've hosted my db on AWS. And my port is open to connect from anywhere. I know it shouldn't be kept like that. I am only doing it since it is a test db. My biggest question is how easy is to a hacker to break passwords? One responder suggested the user had a weak password. Another, who worked for MongoDB, said the proper response was to pay for the company's own managed (and expensive) solution. But I had the same question, since I had used a 24-character password that a brute force attack shouldn't have cracked within a few days of launching the server. In looking into this, I found two things: First, password authentication on MongoDB is **\*\*turned off by default\*\***. Even more confusing, there is not even a line in the MongoDB config file with authorization explicitly disabled. Instead, the database administrator must go into the \`/etc/mongod.conf\` log file, go under the \`#Security\` section, uncomment that, and then manually add the parameter \`authorization: "enabled"\` underneath. This is not obvious, and you have to rifle through the MongoDB docs to figure it out. Second, Linode, the cloud provider we use, **\*\*did not turn authorization on\*\*** when the server was created through their one-click MongoDB instantiation process (which lets you create a MongoDB server in a GUI without having to download, install and configure it yourself), despite having users like me create passwords for the server admin account. To illustrate the misunderstanding that users would have that they've created a password-protected server, this is what Linode's MongoDB creation process looks like: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/mongo-creation-screen.png) A reasonable person would believe that the password set under "Mongo Password" is the password needed to access their database. In fact, at the time I created my server, it wasn't — as it turned out, the config file still had no line for authorization. The password was set, but it wasn't actually used for anything. When I brought this up to Linode after the attack, this was their response: > Hello, > > I took some time to evaluate the information that you provided. I would like to thank you for the effort that you put into investigating this, and I apologize for the hardship that you have encountered over this issue. > > I took more time to evaluate the documentation from MongoDB, specifically the [MongoDB Authentication](https://www.mongodb.com/features/mongodb-authentication?ref=components.news). Reading through the documentation I was able to verify what you stated. My assumption was that our Marketplace App had enabled this during installation. I created a new Linode with the MongoDB Marketplace App that you used. I followed our guide, as you likely did as well. > > I had hoped to find that /etc/mongod.conf would show security: authorization: "enabled". > > Like you stated, it instead shows: > > `security: > > authorization: "disabled"` > > I would like to thank you for bringing this to our attention. We value security at Linode, and you have done us a service by letting us know about this. I have escalated this issue to our Marketplace Apps Team. There are a few items of note here. First, Linode deserves credit for taking the issue seriously and actually responding with at least a pledge to action. Second, they themselves were still under the misunderstanding that there is a specific config line for authorization that is disabled by default, rather than there being no config line at all. Third, and most importantly, Linode's admission is an important wrench thrown into the interpretation offered by the dismissive figures at MongoDB and their mouthpieces in the tech press — that this attack is easily attributed to the catchall diagnosis of "user error". Among the top results I found when searching for any information on this attack was an article on the tech news site ZDNet by Catalin Cimpanu, whose bio says he was "security reporter" for the site from 2018 to 2021\. From what I can gather from his archived articles, Catalin's work was the same public relations wingmanship that constitutes nearly all mainstream tech journalism, as examined in [our report on the consumer tech review industry](https://components.news/the-new-pornographers/). Catalin's last five articles published before he decamped from ZDNET were: [a rewritten press release from Google about Chrome](https://www.zdnet.com/article/go-malware-is-now-common-having-been-adopted-by-both-apts-and-e-crime-groups/?ref=components.news), [a rewritten press release from infosec company Intezer about the Go language](https://www.zdnet.com/article/go-malware-is-now-common-having-been-adopted-by-both-apts-and-e-crime-groups/?ref=components.news), a rewritten press release from infosec company Proofpoint, and [a republished content marketing infographic created by CrowdStrike](https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-chart-shows-the-connections-between-cybercrime-groups/?ref=components.news). True to form, Catalin's 2020 [article on the Mongo attack](https://www.zdnet.com/article/hacker-ransoms-23k-mongodb-databases-and-threatens-to-contact-gdpr-authorities/?ref=components.news) seems to be the result of a single conversation with a security researcher who handed him the news, peppered with some background information on Mongo's yearslong history of its servers being hacked by the tens of thousands. Rather than use this new attack to interrogate that history and question if there's maybe something about Mongo's design that makes it susceptible to recurrent crisis, Catalin deflected the question entirely using official MongoDB PR: > \[T\]hese "MongoDB wiping & ransom" attacks aren't new, per-se. The attacks Gevers spotted today are just the latest phase of a series of attacks that started back in December 2016…More than 28,000 servers were ransomed in a series of attacks in January 2017, another 26,000 in September 2017, and then another 3,000 in February 2019. > > *Back in 2017, David Ottenheimer, Senior Director of Product Security at MongoDB, Inc., blamed the attacks — *\*\*and rightfully so\*\** — on database owners who failed to set a password for their databases, and then left their servers exposed online without a firewall.* > > *Almost three years later, nothing appears to have changed. From the 60,000 MongoDB servers left exposed online in early 2017, the needle has barely moved to 48,000 exposed servers today, most of which have no authentication enabled. (Emphasis added)"* As we've seen, setting a password isn't enough, despite the assessment of the very senior figure at MongoDB Catalin quotes responsible for ensuring that this stuff doesn't happen. That more than a hundred thousand MongoDB users would be capable of instantiating databases but would leave them online without password protection doesn't seem all that plausible. These kinds of discrepancies hold little interest for Catalin. It would be bad enough had he simply parroted a MongoDB upper-manager's dismissal of this entire problem as user error and moved on. It's the willing addition of explicit support for the company line, his bootlicking "rightfully so", that points to a deeper neurosis. Generally speaking, deferral to user error allows product designers to both avoid solving a problem as well as stand superior next to users getting wrecked from product — a winning stroke where one garners all the entitlement and none of the responsibility. Here, Catalin's "rightfully so" is a lame gesture to command expertise by proxy — in this case, that of the finger-wagging MongoDB manager. For people like Catalin, whose careers are built on stenographic transmission of corporate messages, siding with a dismissive Director puts them on the Director's level, above incompetent users, allowing them to signal expert knowledge without having to know much at all. This genius-through-mimesis is everywhere in the field, and it's something PR managers work to cultivate. One example that has stuck with me over the years comes from a 2019 *\*Verge\** article on Apple's then-new A13 chip. The title, "[Apple says its new A13 Bionic chip brings hours of extra battery life to new iPhones](https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/9/10/20857177/apple-iphone-11-processor-a13-cpu-speed-graphics-specs?ref=components.news)," is already a press release by itself, and one can sense the warmth of engineering knowledge the writer, Sean Holliser, felt he was cozying next to when he wrote this line: > *That efficiency boost is despite fitting a record 8.5 billion transistors inside and upping performance by roughly 20 percent across the board — and Apple says the chip now has the most machine learning (ML) performance, too, with an eight-core neural engine that adds “6x faster matrix multiplication.” Overall, the chip’s capable of one trillion operations per second, according to Apple.* Whether Sean knows what matrix multiplication actually is or how it's related to machine learning is doubtful given that he stuck it in quotes, and it's irrelevant anyway. What mattered for Sean when he typed those words in his Google Doc was the privilege he felt to write "matrix multiplication," and for a moment *\*feel\** like a person who knew what it was, as one might repeat intelligible syllables in Japanese without understanding what they're saying. I've personally known people in this field like Sean and Catalin — none of them have run a Linux command their entire lives and would be unable to investigate this MongoDB issue or compare the speed at which different Apple chip generations find dot products even if they wanted to. When faux tech journalists have to cover a topic as existential as information security (a specialty where expertise is routinely battle tested in a way that milkier disciplines like user experience aren't), the chasm between their putative role and their actual execution reaches its starkest and most embarrassing contrast. This isn't a new critique of journalism in the age of content, nor of the broader phenomenon of absolute, worshipful supplication to brands that has become unimaginably worse over the past 15 years. But even if the ignominious field of tech journalism has no prospects of self-improvement and public relations is baked into its DNA, there is always at least the temporary relief of disgracing its actors, as well as the figures they serve, by doing their jobs better than them. ### What content did Pornhub remove? URL: https://components.news/what-content-did-pornhub-remove/ Last updated: 2025-09-28T20:09:01.000Z In 2019, Components released the first analysis I’m aware of on the [ascent and dominance of step-fantasy porn](https://components.news/every-story-is-an-epstein-story/) on Pornhub, based on metadata from a sample of 218,000 videos spanning the years 2008 to 2018\. This analysis later served as the basis of Mashable’s [treatment](https://mashable.com/article/step-porn-incest-videos-pornhub?ref=components.news) of the same topic. At the end of 2020, *New York Times* columnist Nicholas Kristof published a [pitch-black article](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-rape-trafficking.html?ref=components.news) on Pornhub owner MindGeek’s repeated handwaving when dealing with complaints of illicit content on its various platforms, including underage and non-consensual videos. In response to the article, Visa and MasterCard ceased processing payments for all of MindGeek’s properties, confronting the company with an existential crisis. MindGeek responded with a sweeping takedown of all unverified (i.e., no blue check) content. Over the course of two days, its library of 14 million videos was [reduced](https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqjjy/pornhub-suspended-all-unverified-videos-content?utm%5Fcontent=1607914584&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fsource=VICE%5Ftwitter) to 4.7 million. Some performers [complained](https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/51520/1/how-pornhub-video-purge-is-hurting-sex-workers?ref=components.news) that, in its survivalist throes, MindGeek overreacted and purged content that was fully compliant with the site’s terms and conditions. As one said, “When I email Pornhub about this, they put my videos back up, but they’re eventually flagged and disabled again, and the cycle repeats.” Nearly two years later, it's unclear whether MindGeek has reached something approaching equilibrium in its content moderation (its CEO and COO resigned three months ago, so the company as a whole isn't quite homeostatic), but the working assumption of this analysis is that things are less frenetic than they were in the immediate aftermath of the exposé. Therefore, we can cross-reference the same dataset used for the original report, see what’s missing, and examine the characteristics of banned content on Pornhub that falls outside of the site’s mere overcorrection. To determine whether a piece was disabled, a script made a request to every URL in the original 218,000-video dataset. Disabled videos on Pornhub have different notices. In the entire dataset, the following notices were returned, with the number of occurrences in parentheses: - “Page not found \[without additional notice\]” (81,639) - “This video has been disabled” (24,204) - “This video was deleted.” (6,636) - “Video has been removed at the request of the copyright holder” (6,202) - “Video has been removed due to a violation of the Terms and Conditions” (3,799) - “Video has failed encoding” (2) The analysis here makes no distinction between these notices; an assumption is that in the harried days following the *Times* expose, Pornhub’s threadbare content moderation team was less than meticulous in applying specific notices to specific videos, trying to simply remove as much potentially violating content as possible. The one technical notice is so infrequent as to be negligible. In total, of the 218,000-video sample, 56% of the videos are now gone. The fact that this number is significantly higher than the fraction of what was left in the days following the *Times* article could either be a sampling error, or it could reflect that what we're analyzing is not the result of the the blind shotgun approach of late 2020, but is content that the site's moderators have genuinely deemed violating in their new, more functional moderation regime. The following table describes some comparative characteristics, including comparisons for all years 2008 to 2018, and for 2018 alone, the latter perhaps being a more apples-to-apples comparison, as disabled views skew more towards earlier years, and don’t account for Pornhub’s greater popularity and algorithmic changes in later years: | Metric | **Enabled** | **Disabled** | **D-to-E ratio** | | ------------------------------------ | ----------- | ------------ | ---------------- | | Median views (all years) | 158,015 | 271,763 | 1.72 | | Median upvotes (all years) | 325 | 487 | 1.49 | | Upvote-to-downvote ratio (all years) | 3.18 | 3.72 | \- | | Median views (2018) | 110,451 | 275,216 | 2.49 | | Median upvotes (2018) | 316 | 885 | 2.8 | | Upvote-to-downvote ratio (2018) | 2.87 | 3.43 | \- | In other words, videos published in 2018 that are now disabled were viewed about two-and-a-half times as much as videos that remain live, and they were upvoted 2.8 times as much. They were also *downvoted* less, as the ratio of upvotes to downvotes is higher for disabled videos in both the all-years and 2018 groups. We can also look at the nature of banned content on two different levels: videos’ categories, and their text. This graph demonstrates the proportion of content with different category tags that are now disabled (for example, 85.67% of videos tagged “Celebrity” were subsequently disabled): ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/pornHub-categories-by-proportion-of-missing-videos.svg) Only categories that appeared at least 100 times are included. While I’m tempted to shower commentary on each one of these results and imbue them with meaning (which I do think they possess), I won’t, except to instruct on the perhaps statistically obvious fact that the further above the yellow line a category is, the more that category is associated with removed content, and the further below, the less associated with removed content. I’ll also clarify a point of confusion among many who saw this graph pre-publication, which is that there was in fact a lot of music on Pornhub, both in the form of “porn music videos” (whose abbreviation we’ll see again shortly) as well as even just [regular music videos](https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/40554/1/uk-drill-videos-disappear-from-youtube-resurface-on-pornhub-instead?ref=components.news). At a far more granular level, we can look at the text of the videos’ titles by lemmatizing the titles' words. In lay terms, lemmatization reduces words to their roots and infinitives. For example, if we lemmatized the tokens of the sentence “i am showing you how tokenization works", we would get the tokens \[i, be, show, -PRON-, how, tokenization, work\], allowing us to remove the noise of difference tenses, plurals, and so on. (Note that the lowercased ‘i’ does not lemmatize to ‘-PRON-\`, which is significant in the following results.) Rather than a graph, here’s a sheet of all the tokens that occurred at least 98 times, with the number of that token's occurrences, and the percentage of videos with that token that was disabled. All of the titles were lowercased and stripped of numbers and punctuation beforehand to reduce redundancy: Many of these results, particularly at the very top, speak for themselves, while others do not. The list is full of abbreviations, like “pmv” (“porn music video”), “amwf” (“asian male white female”), and so on. I’ve left individual letters, despite the difficulty of identifying their significance detached from the data. For example “y” occurs in both Spanish videos, as well titles with things like “18 y.o.” "i" seems to pretty universally stand for the first-person pronoun. And so on. Parsing the meaning (cultural, psychoanalytic, journalistic, algorithmic, etc.) of these results is a project in its own right. Hopefully someone can perform the interpretive due diligence on what's here. To that effect, the revised Pornhub dataset with columns relating to video's status is now also available to use. ### How much money do people make on Bandcamp? URL: https://components.news/bandcamp-income-distribution/ Last updated: 2025-10-04T18:51:55.000Z One of the major angles left entirely unexamined in our [initial report](https://components.news/bandcamp-the-chaos-bazaar) on Bandcamp's economics — which analyzed how much the platform was making as a whole, and through what kinds of sales — is how much individual sellers actually earn on the site. The answer, as it turns out, is not a lot. This is the distribution of income on Bandcamp in 2021, across about 17.4 million sales events and about 706,000 artists: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/bandcamp-income-distribution.jpg) This excludes a few different incarnations of "Various Artists" — which occurs in complications — and it doesn't control for duplicate names of artists, which, based on some cursory inspection, doesn't matter as much as one might think anyway. In typical fat tail fashion, a sliver of individuals receive the vast majority of the total money earned from the site. (These numbers are counted before fees, taxes, and so on, which means the actual take home pay is even less.) There are a thousand ways to demonstrate just how small a sliver it is. Beyond the quantile statistics in the graph, here are a few more: - 5.4% of artists made at least $600, the new 2022 tax threshold for certain income reporting requirements in the United States. - The top 2% of artists made 60.7% of all income in 2021, and made 1.55 times as much as the entire bottom 98%. The top 5% of artists made 75.7% of all income in 2021, and made 3.11 times as much as the entire bottom 95%. - This statistic seems ripe for abuse by craven publishers reworking these findings into clickbait, but Bandcamp's (unweighted) Gini coefficient — an index of income inequality, from 0 (least unequal) to 1 (most unequal) — is 0.896, which would make it the most unequal country in the world. While I offer this last statistic to give a sense of scale, I can't emphasize enough that not only does it make an inapposite comparison between national economies and single websites, but that one would likely find similar (probably worse) figures when examining other platforms. For instance, the convolutions of Spotify's payout system, in which artist compensation is a mind-numbing mix of proportional plays per subscriber, all modulated by the intricacies of deals worked out with major labels, almost certainly moves this coefficient closer to 1. The conditions creating this fat tail distribution and the question of whether or not that distribution is desirable or even avoidable are overshadowed by the triviality of the amounts of money in question. That an artist in Bandcamp's top 1% makes as much from selling music in an entire year as an entry level software developer does in two weeks is probably not the best economic signal, and it's difficult to argue that the company bears much blame for this. Bandcamp was not the one to load up Spotify with enough runway to operate at a loss seemingly in perpetuity, offer products for next to free, and thereby reconfigure the entire economics of the industry. ## Fat tails, long tails, all tails Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. However, when I [argue](https://components.news/on-epics-acquisition-of-bandcamp/) that the company's long standing complacency should give way to an antagonism towards its competitors (i.e., streaming companies), it is in the interest of raising this baseline. As Components' Jules Becker pointed out, however more gaping the yawn between Spotify's winners and losers, the sheer volume of its userbase means 13,400 artists "generated" at least $50,000 on the platform in 2021, according to the company's [own numbers](https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/?ref=components.news) — on Bandcamp, it was 139, a disparity too wide to be explained by Spotify propaganda alone. The wishful thinking I've expressed for the Epic acquisition is that aggressive promotion of their new subsidiary would contribute to a course correction of the music market (along with central banks raising their interest rates that kneecaps companies like Spotify and the entire tech economy). It's entirely possible that this problem becomes worse under them, but we'll see. --- There is, though, one small thing I couldn't help but pry out of this data, and while on the one hand it's not so substantial as to even mention alongside the discussion of this graph, my own pet peeves force me to. Bandcamp Daily, the site's in-house publication, includes an Album of the Day feature to promote albums deemed notable by its editors. Between January 1 and August 1 of 2022, roughly 28% of the artists whose albums were featured were already in the top 1% of sellers in 2021\. About 57% were already in the top 5%, and 72% were already in the top 10%. These artists were about 2.6 times more likely to come from New York, London or Los Angeles than artists in the general Bandcamp population. To what extent an Album of the Day placement actually boosts earnings is entirely unclear, although I can say with near certainty that it has next to nothing to do with shaping the income distribution curve. And the company's occasional expressions of goodwill can confuse people into believing that it operates as some kind of charity. Not only does it not, but it shouldn't — in the delusional 2010s economy of quantitative easing, its profitability grew into an unexpected virtue, a cornerstone of reality and, within its specific context, genuine value. (As argued in [our most recent report](https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/), the same is true of most gaming studios, and not true of most startups.) If elevating a select number of musicians residing in a small network of global hyperreal cities is more profitable than not doing that, then fine, Bandcamp Daily is content marketing, not music journalism (not that music journalists do a better job at veering off this network anyway lol); its job is to increase sales on the platform. And even among the top sliver, most artists are arguably still obscure enough to the general userbase to warrant an introduction. But I would question how much revenue is boosted by featuring the new Burial album compared to someone that readers would simply otherwise have never heard of. ### The Gamer and the Nihilist URL: https://components.news/the-gamer-and-the-nihilist/ Last updated: 2025-11-13T18:31:59.000Z ## Summary This report is the result of an analysis of Product Hunt from 2014 to 2021, including 76,822 products and 397,067 user profiles. Among its findings is that users who promote productivity apps and users who promote games are the least likely to be the same people, among any pair of categories. We argue that this opposition is a reflection of two nearly irreconcilable value systems. The first system, belonging to the person we have dubbed the nihilist, views productivity app usage as a means to reduce wasted time, but ironically turns this usage into an end in itself. This results in the appearance of productivity, but the actual production of relatively little. The second system, belonging to the person we’ve dubbed the gamer, situates the fun of gaming as an end in itself, which disincentivizes them from activities that eat into time spent having fun, such as faux productive behavior. The gamer equates waste itself to value, and can clearly separate utilitarian from non-utilitarian activity. The nihilist, on the other hand, is unable to explicitly value waste, and thus wastes time in a meaningless way. These opposing systems animate the types of organizations that cater to each persona: the perennially unprofitable venture-backed startup, for which faux productivity is connected to the generally immaterial nature of its high valuations, versus the game studio that lives and dies by the profitability of its products. The irreconcilability of the nihilist's and gamer's understandings of value is made manifest when the former's framework commandeers the latter's, resulting in compromised games (as in the case of Microsoft), or the appropriation of games into work and financial speculation (e.g., play-to-earn crypto games and the tokenized metaverse more generally). The earliest work on this project began in 2020, and the bulk of it took place in late 2021 and early 2022, during a continued period of euphoric valuations of both tech stocks and cryptocurrencies. As we finalized this project, both nosedived from their pandemic peaks after inflation concerns forced central banks around the world to raise interest rates. We hope this report provides worthwhile material to consider for creating organizations that require more than low interest rates to thrive, and to reflect on the meaning of value itself. --- ## Introduction ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/product-hunt-homepage.webp) **The Product Hunt homepage.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/product-hunt-product-page.jpg) **A Product Hunt product page.* Product Hunt, the internet's largest social network and clearinghouse for apps, launched in 2013 when founder Ryan Hoover decided to build a central location to replace the word-of-mouth process his peers used to promote tech products they liked or had built. The result was something of a twist on Reddit, but for software, relying on three types of users to function. There are the Makers, who build and release products on the site; the Hunters, who sponsor a product by promoting it to their followers (each product can only have one Hunter); and the audience, which upvotes and comments on individual products. Within three years, Product Hunt had become so vital to product launches — Zapier, Notion and Slack are just three of the companies once publicized there that went on to multi-billion dollar valuations — that it was acquired by AngelList for $20 million. Today, Product Hunt remains a key scouting location for venture capital firms looking for new investments; the site is "a must-read website in the VC world,” [according to](https://medium.com/cobinangels/what-if-product-hunt-was-an-automated-vc-fund-9665edf3d5af?ref=components.news) one firm partner, and a place where "venture capitalists flock to…as a sourcing mechanism", as another [put it](https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/product-hunt?ref=components.news). The interest of VCs in Product Hunt is well justified, as [one analysis](https://www.cobinangels.com/blog/what-if-product-hunt-was-an-automated-vc-fund-article?ref=components.news) found that "an investment strategy based on Product Hunt votes would have outperformed the majority of funds out there." ## Between value and valuation Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. As Product Hunt flourished under AngelList, Hoover embarked on the obvious career pivot by becoming a VC. In 2017, he founded the [Weekend Fund](https://www.weekend.fund/?ref=components.news). Four years later, Product Hunt itself spun off [Hyper](https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/20/hyper-is-a-new-fund-that-offers-300k-checks-and-promises-of-a-media-slingshot-for-founders/?ref=components.news), an accelerator fund. Earlier this year, both Product Hunt and Hyper were packaged together into a single holding company called [Prologue](https://prologue.xyz/?ref=components.news), which was given $23 million in funding from goliath venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. Product Hunt's outsized role in the startup economy makes it a rich, semi-structured proxy for analyzing the broader paradigm of Silicon Valley — as a mirror of where VC attention is directed, of the tastes and interests of aspirational product designers, and as a imprint of the undergirding mores internalized by tech's inhabitants. --- ## Analysis **Summary:** *Reducing sets of product category tags to only the largest category tag for each product reveals that Hunters who promote games are the least likely to promote products related to productivity, and vice versa.* Let's start by situating ourselves on the map. This is how many products appear in the data on a monthly basis, beginning in 2014 (Product Hunt’s first full year) and stopping at the end of 2021\. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/products-per-month.png) Whether this represents the actual number of products released on Product Hunt throughout this period is difficult to determine. The products and user data that appears in this analysis is based solely on the Product Hunt sitemap, and anecdotal experience indicates that not every product gets indexed there. But given the general smoothness of the curve, and the overall number of the products here (more than 70,000), it's as large a sample as one is liable to get. The geographic data below is based on self-reported information on people's Twitter accounts, which many link to from their Product Hunt user profiles. In all, 158,329 profiles linked to Twitter accounts have usable country information (e.g., "US" and "United States" can be normalized using the Google Maps API, but "🌍" and "NY/SF/London" can't be), and 124,073 usable city information. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/geo-stats-hunters.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/geo-stats-makers.png) Some results may surprise (the dominance of Ukraine and Russia among upvoted Makers and Hunters, for instance) and others may not (the disproportionate occurrence of Americans, and specifically San Franciscans). The higher global median for Makers versus Hunters is due to the fact votes are counted for each product's Maker for each unique country. As we discovered, the more Makers a product has, the more upvotes it receives. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/product-pairs.png) Every product profile on Product Hunt contains a set of category tags. Users can follow these topics and receive notifications when new products with those tags are released. (One tag, "Tech," was removed from our analysis because of its ubiquity early in Product Hunt's history.) Since our thesis rests on the interplay of these tags, let's start by looking at them broadly, at both the most common tags in their own right as well as the most common pairs of tags. (The y-axes of these proportions were min-max normalized for each category when calculating the slopes.) Looking at how these categories have grown since the beginning of our dataset gives a sharper view of how dominant the most popular tags became by the end of 2021\. Aside from the platform-oriented categories, the overall most common categories also have grown the most as a proportion of total products, observed by calculating the slope of the proportions of products with a given category over the whole time period. "Productivity," "Marketing," "Developer Tools," "Artificial Intelligence," and "SaaS" are the biggest gainers. In 2021, the "Productivity" tag was included in 39 percent of all product listings. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/highest-growing-cat.png) Calculating shrinkage is more difficult and less exact, since some categories temporarily spike (the fact that these spikes all seem to appear in the same place raises questions about Product Hunt itself and its standards for categorization, as does the sudden, precipitous drop in some of the categories in our growth chart). Obviously, most of these curves aren't linear. As a *predictive* exercise, using a linear model here would be forbidden, but as a merely *descriptive* exercise, it tells us what we need to know. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/highest-contracting-cat.png) Importantly, the results all map to basic reality. The diminishment of operating systems — "Windows," "Mac," and "Linux" — corresponds to software-as-a-service (SaaS) web apps solidifying their dominance as a delivery system for software over the studied period. The near disappearance of "Ridesharing" coincides with the dried up interest in building third-party apps for (or, more certainly, alternatives to) Uber and Lyft. "Custom iPhone Keyboards" are a category of product whose existence we had forgotten about until seeing their downfall here. And the occurrence of three game-related tags — "PS4," "Xbox One," and "Oculus Rift" — are meaningful not only for appearing together, but for signaling a broader disinterest in gaming on the platform over time. The "Games" category, while the 10th most popular tag overall, was 20th in 2021\. And as we'll see shortly, games underperform nearly every other category on the site. To examine what types of products people on the platform generally like, it's more useful to look at which categories are most and least likely to be voted into the Product of the Day rankings (reaching the rankings was all that mattered, the order of the rank was ignored) rather than looking at upvotes, as those numbers fluctuate. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/product-of-the-day-2.png) The patterns among the top ranked products are relatively straightforward, and at the bottom, they are resounding. Games and their subcategories are the least likely to receive top recognition on the platform. Perhaps this is because Hunters are more likely to promote amazing spreadsheet-type apps and less likely to promote good games. Or maybe it has to do with the nature of the platform itself: it's easier to quickly grasp the intention and capabilities of a new prototyping tool than it is to fully evaluate *The Witcher 3* (a game Hunted on the site). What follows in the rest of this report is an argument that neither of these arguments fully explains the broad rejection of games on Product Hunt. To that effect, let's examine one last graph. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/cat-correlations.png) This graph shows which categories correlate among Hunters themselves. To examine this, every product's set of categories was reduced to only its largest category. For example, if a product's tags are “Games,” “Raspberry Pi,” and “Batteries,” and if “Games” appears more often in the entire dataset than the other two, that product's category tags will be reduced only to “Games.” Only Hunters with at least two and fewer than 50 hunted products were included, and only tags that occurred at least 20 times among them all were included. We then looked at the Spearman coefficient for every pair of categories. Negative values mean a Hunter who promotes X category is less likely to promote Y; positive values mean the opposite. The categories in the visualization, in addition to gaming, include every category for which gaming was the most negatively correlated category — i.e., those most likely to be hunted by people different than those hunting gaming products. There are some caveats to state outright, mainly that not every relationship in this graph is necessarily meaningful, or at least not obviously so. Many of these values fall into top-10 territory despite being quite small comparatively. Whether people who like games really are disproportionately interested in “Firefox Extensions,” or whether those drawn to “Productivity” really are Scrooge-like, aren't claims anyone should make by citing this graph. Nevertheless, many of these relationships are, *prima facie*, meaningful, including every pair in the list of most positive correlations. That the same person would be interested in both “Augmented Reality” and “Wearables,” or “Snapchat” and “Twitter,” needs no further explanation, because it maps to an apparent reality of how tastes relate to one another. Our argument is simply this: The opposition between “Productivity” and “Games” — that a Hunter who promotes games and a Hunter who promotes productivity tools is less likely to be the same person than for any other pair of interests on Product Hunt — not only maps to an apparent reality, but also to a broader critique of Silicon Valley and its framework of value, time, and experience. Let's now step away from the data and examine our two personas — one drawn to productivity apps, and the other to games. We'll call the first the nihilist, and the second the gamer. --- ## The nihilist **Summary**: *The nihilist is not everyone who uses productivity tools, but the person who sees these tools as ends in and of themselves, and for whom the disciplined use of such tools corresponds with the opposite of their stated purpose — i.e., the absence of producing much of anything at all. The world of the nihilist is a kluge of productivity apps that tumorously agglomerate Akira-like in both the nihilist’s organization and individual life. The nihilist’s goal is to project a hologram of value in order to deceive everyone, from peers to managers to investors to the nihilist themself, that something valuable is actually taking place.* In 2018, Judy Wajcman, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, published a paper based on her interviews with electronic calendar designers in the Bay Area. Titled ["How Silicon Valley sets time"](http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/91404/1/Wajcman%5FHow-Silicon-Walley.pdf?ref=components.news), the paper drew a continuum from Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management of the early 20th Century — in which Taylor pioneered the practice of timing employees performing tasks down to the second to more efficiently orchestrate their actions — to electronic calendars in the 21st, situating both as nodes in the development of capitalistic time optimization. From an academic perspective, all predictable enough so far. But what makes Wajcman's paper so useful are the details of this historical continuum, as well as the preoccupations and values expressed by her interviewees: *"In response to my query about why they were working on calendar products, many of my interviewees immediately told me about their own, personal quest for efficient time management. They expressed pride in the way they optimize time, which was a crucial part of their self-presentation and linked to an optimal self. Indeed, their commitment to improving the functionality of calendars seemed, at least in part, driven by their own need for a better calendar.”* It's important to state this explicitly: The explosion of productivity apps on Product Hunt cannot be separated from the personal interests and self-identities of their designers, whose own focus on productivity exists in service of developing other apps for productivity, a feedback loop in which the only thing being optimized is the means of optimization itself. Wajcman pinpoints the introduction of an application called Agenda in 1988 as a key node in the development of electronic time management. "The aim…was to develop a ‘Personal Information Manager’," she writes. “It was a new generation of software, developed in line with the dream, as old as computing itself, that computers could be used to master tides of information. Indeed, it came to be described as a ‘*spreadsheet for words*’....to build a comprehensive ‘interpersonal information manager’ that would *end the silos* between emails/tasks/appointments/notes/addresses, but also between music/photos/blogs…and make this all secure and shared.” (Emphasis added.) Those who have paid even passing attention to modern productivity software will recognize the language and aim of Agenda, a project from more than 30 years ago, and therefore the broad endeavor of saving time, breaking silos, and endlessly iterating on what essentially amounts to the same few products, over and over, decade after decade. In fact, one sees all of these features emerge when examining the words that define the "Productivity" tag in Product Hunt. Looking at the terms that are more likely to occur in listings for "Productivity" products than any other type, we can see what productivity broadly signifies: The *minimization of wasted time*, and the *optimization of other tools*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/words-productivity.png) Of course, this expanding superabundance of productivity tools is accompanied by a handful of paradoxes. The first is that, as Wajcman observed of her interviewees, the job of dutifully organizing one's own calendar (and by extension, administering most kinds of software-based productivity regimens) "becomes a new task in itself, a form of skilled labour or competency that must be cultivated." Importantly, this task is not simply a minor adjunct to one's primary activities whose net gain is easily identifiable. Instead, "\[a\]s one of the designers I interviewed, who writes a blog advising people on how to hone their calendaring practice, told me (without irony), he actually spends quite a lot of time doing this work.” This irony operates on an organizational level as well. According to [one survey](https://productiv.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/productiv-the-state-of-saas-sprawl-ebook.pdf?ref=components.news), the average company now has over 200 app licenses, only 45% of which are ever used. The sheer quantity of apps available in the workplace proliferates to such a degree that they ultimately necessitate their own management team and become a source of confusion for actual employees, whose attention is splintered between three messaging apps, seven spreadsheet apps, and four project management apps. This cancerous spread inevitably becomes the rationale for the adoption of an umbrella app, which promises to unify and integrate the functions of all the other apps within a single piece of software, and which it almost always fails to do. Second, it's unclear whether making all these apps available to employees has measurably improved productivity on any macro level. On the contrary, the more convincing evidence is that measurable labor productivity[ hasn’t notably increased since 1970.](https://qz.com/633080/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-productivity-growth/?ref=components.news) The picture looks worse the closer you zoom in: Between 2010 and 2018, labor productivity grew by an [annual rate of less than one percent](https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2021/article/the-us-productivity-slowdown-the-economy-wide-and-industry-level-analysis.htm?ref=components.news#:~:text=The%20slow%20growth%20observed%20since,percent%20from%202010%20to%202018.), even as the development of these apps ascended to a yet unrealized zenith. Third, the amount of work whose purpose is nearly impossible to discern has reached an astronomical level. This landscape of meaningless labor formed the premise of David Graeber's landmark 2013 essay ["On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,"](https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/?ref=components.news) in which he argued that "Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it." The wide ranging response to Graeber's thesis (spanning everyone from those who took the highest umbrage to others who felt they were reading a line-by-line account of their own lives) included two surveys, one by the British polling agency YouGov, and the other by a Dutch firm. The results of the two surveys were strikingly similar: Of the employed, 37 percent of Brits believed their work made "no meaningful contribution to the world," and 40 percent of Netherlanders believed, even more pertinently to our current analysis, that their jobs had no reason to even exist — that they could not fathom how their employment aided their organization's production of anything. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/ceros-headcount-growth.png) **A startup displays its success by boasting about its headcount growth.* Most startup managers would of course consider themselves exempt from such assessments; there's no data readily available indicating that employees within them are more or less useless than those at any other type of company. From collective anecdotal experience, startups are plagued by bullshit jobs at least at the same magnitude as any other category of firm, a reality borne out by the inevitable hiring spree undertaken by most startups after large funding rounds, and the emphasis on headcount as a meaningful measure of a company's success. Given all of this, the question is why, amidst a broader context of such glaring unproductivity, Silicon Valley's treatment of productivity has taken on what one of Wajcman's interviewees described as a nearly religious imperative, and why it has come to dominate the descriptions of products on the internet's most prominent clearinghouse of new software? Why is so much money (in investment capital for productivity apps, in individual and corporate licenses to use them) and personal time poured into an area whose ability to boost actual productivity is either negative or negligible? The answer formed Graeber’s thesis, and is obvious to anyone whose life doesn’t depend on not seeing it: actual productivity isn’t the objective. Instead, the objective is the feeling of busyness, regardless of whether that busyness is connected to the production of anything at all. This optimization of nothing beyond the sensation of working hard comes in different forms for different actors, but it sits at the nexus of Silicon Valley's conception of productivity. To the [Veblenian Entrepreneur](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=3479042&ref=components.news) — a breed of aspirant startup founder for whom, according to the researchers who coined the concept, "entrepreneurship \[is\] an activity, defined by symbolic manipulation, tokenism and consumption" — using productivity apps is one in a number of cargo cult rituals practiced to secure an entrepreneurial identity. In fact, Product Hunt itself, which offers a subscription program for aspiring founders "to kickstart your startup," fits squarely within the researchers' characterization of the "Entrepreneurship Industry," a market of goods and services that caters to the Veblenian Entrepreneur and ultimately contributes to "an economy that outwardly appears dynamic and entrepreneurial, but is rife with inefficiencies and lacks substantive innovative capacity." For the middle manager, busy-work is usually done in service to some performance indicator whose relation to the core business and its ability to profit is ambiguous at best and more often simply nonexistent. In a *Harvard Business Review* article that recast middle managers as “connecting leaders,” the researcher Zahira Jaser wrote that their performance depended on practices like “empathizing with both sides” and “speaking up for others.” Put in simpler terms, the middle manager’s job is to fill up their chosen calendar and task management apps as much as possible. From the perspective of VCs, the ultimate objective is not productivity as dictated by conventional market logic (i.e., the minimization of costs and the maximization of profits on goods and services), but the shuffling of money between investors, facilitated through the aggregation of various narrative components — branding, headcount increases, a mythos of disruption — until the investment position has grown enough to be worth cashing out through acquisition or IPO. This understanding of the startup economy was lucidly framed in one of the most potent scenes from the series *Silicon Valley*, a show that tech mandarins routinely claim to enjoy but whose deep critiques they inevitably seem to reject. In a sector of the economy where "it's not about how much you earn, but about how much you're worth," the labors of the companies whose workflows are built on the kinds of productivity apps that today comprise nearly 40 percent of Product Hunt's output are not actually directed at the creation of a thing, but at the appearance of the creation of a thing. This detachment between productive-like behavior and actual productivity is why the runaway expansion of apps throughout organizations rarely prompts a reevaluation of their usage, but instead initiates the adoption of yet another super app to solve the problem. The company that conducted the survey mentioned above on the proliferation of SaaS apps was founded to capitalize on this overabundance: Its name is Productiv, it has raised $73 million, and it sells a "software-as-a-service management platform," a category one Gartner analyst [called](https://www.wsj.com/articles/startup-productiv-raises-45-million-in-new-funding-11617190200?ref=components.news) "a growing but early-stage market." --- ## The gamer **Summary**: *Unlike the nihilist, whose strictures forbid the very idea of wasted time, the gamer centralizes waste (i.e., non-productive activity) as the essence of life's meaning, and therefore as the foundation of value. Accordingly, contrary to the nihilist (who destroys value in their attempt to reduce waste), the gamer is a value maximizer, for the simple reason that they want to minimize the time spent on productive activity and maximize the time spent playing games. This basic arithmetic leads to a straightforward result that avoids the nihilist’s Mobius strip of endlessly optimizing the optimizations, which as we’ve seen, leads to completely nonoptimal systems. The gamer sees ends as ends, and means as means.* In *The Accursed Share*, George Bataille introduced "general economy," his theory of understanding economies as systems organized primarily for non-utilitarian goods. While day-to-day exchanges — getting your car serviced, buying widgets, etc. — may appear utilitarian up close, at a distance, the broader, general economy ultimately serves non-utilitarian ends. That's because the excess generated by this economic activity can't be reabsorbed for continued expansion — the mechanic can't further expand their shop, the widget maker can't increase their widget production, and so on, resulting in money that has no place to go. This excess is waste, the accursed share which Bataille defined as wealth, and is ultimately directed to unproductive expenditures, like "games, spectacles, arts, and perverse \[non-reproductive\] sexual activity" — as well as, in his ethnographic reading, war and human sacrifice. In short, the waste is directed towards those things which "have no end beyond themselves." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/bataille-cruelty-squad.png) **From the true ending to* [**Cruelty Squad*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty%5FSquad/?ref=components.news). To Bataille, this waste isn't merely economic — it comprises our very cosmic order, as the sun radiates its waste energy and provides the earth with life. "Beyond our immediate ends, man's activity in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfillment of the universe,” he wrote. To place waste — which "must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically” — at the center of economics is therefore required not only to accurately depict the function of economies, but of life's very meaning. The tension between utilitarian and non-utilitarian understandings of both economics and the universe [found its way](https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun?utm%5Fsource=pocket%5Fmylist) into Graeber's work as well, who specifically considered fun as one possible aim of life's useless fulfillment. After considering the types of theories proposed by rationalist evolutionary biologists who evaluate all behavior for their capacity to maximize survival, Graeber — drawing a line through the random movements of subatomic particles, the observed behavior of ants playing, and human predilection for fun — roughly proposed a different interpretation in the fashion of Bataille: > Let us imagine a principle. Call it a…principle of ludic freedom. Let us imagine it to hold that the free exercise of an entity’s most complex powers or capacities will, under certain circumstances at least, tend to become an end in itself. It would obviously not be the only principle active in nature. Others pull other ways… \[S\]uch a perspective is at least as plausible as the weirdly inconsistent speculations that currently pass for orthodoxy, in which a mindless, robotic universe suddenly produces poets and philosophers out of nowhere. The Graebarian construction, then, gives us at least one polarity — fun at one end, bullshit at the other — similar to that which emerges in our data. On either end of this polarity, there is the person who centers experience (particularly the fun kind) as an end in and of itself, and there is the person who centers something else, like optimization for its own sake. And if the universe is calibrated precisely to generate seemingly useless experiences from its excesses, then the person who centers productivity has instead centered something meaningless. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/reggie-fils-if-its-not-fun-why-bother.png) **Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aimé announcing the release of the Nintendo Switch in 2017.* In this sense, the gamer does not only include those who play video games (nor does it necessarily include all those who do). The gamer is a synecdoche; skateboarders, people who seriously play sports, interested music listeners, cinephiles, chess players, big wave surfers, and anyone else who *orients* their lives towards experiences that contain fun as a major ingredient are all subsumed into the persona. Casually playing a game on a subway or after a busy day to unwind doesn't by itself garner the gamer moniker, while taking paid vacation time to spend a focused 100 hours on *Elden Ring* does. Since the gamer is able to properly identify waste versus productive behavior, these activities are never confused for one another, and they maintain their separation. In the world of the nihilist, this barrier collapses; waste and production have no distinction. Among the many ramifications of this collapse is that the nihilist spends their wasted time in the most un-fun ways possible, performing faux productive activity. The nihilist is [unable to see](https://ez.substack.com/p/why-we-shouldnt-be-surprised-people) activities as anything other than means to an end, evaluating all objects for their utility in lubricating some other activity — for example, the use of music solely for exercise, falling asleep, building productivity apps, and so on. Because of this, there is no end, only self-perpetuating means. For the gamer, these objects — music, film, games, etc. — form the basis of any cosmic argument, and experience constitutes the bedrock of their understanding of themselves in relation to everything else. Perhaps it's because of this very ability to distinguish genuinely productive activity from waste that the gamer's organizations tend to follow a saners business models, one in which companies live or die by what they make, not valuations based on speculative futures. We previously explored this dichotomy in our [report](https://components.news/bandcamp-the-chaos-bazaar/) on the business models of Bandcamp versus Spotify — the former (which centralizes music as an end in itself) profitable by facilitating straightforward exchanges between producer and consumer, the latter (which has advanced [music as little more than a hormone-boosting adjunct](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/revenue-streams?ref=components.news) to other activities) commanding a market cap of $69 billion at its peak in 2021 despite failing to earn a profit nearly every quarter. The economy of game production has so far remained relatively untouched by venture capital and its valuation-over-value modus operandi. The main exceptions include free-to-play Skinner Box mobile games (which do not constitute experiences so much as anti-experiences) and a few high-profile companies such as Epic and Roblox, both of which attracted VC attention because they are seen by investors as stepping stones to something beyond merely a game. Roblox garnered investment because of its metaverse potential, and therefore its potential as a future monopoly. Epic has attracted $7 billion in investment for the same reason, along with *Fortnite*'s popularity in eSports, a sector VCs have fewer qualms about investing in due to teams' abilities to be leveraged into apparel and content brands. (In fact, Epic only became seen as a company worth investing in upon *Fortnite*'s release ― their output in the 16 years leading up to the game, in which they built and sold the widely used Unreal Engine and developed the mega successful *Gears of War* franchise, won them seemingly no solicitation from Silicon Valley whatsoever.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/100-thieves-dtc.png) As an example of this sort of leveraging, consider 100 Thieves, an association of eSports teams that has received $120 million in funding from investors including Sequoia and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. Just before the upswing of Covid, the company [released a video tour](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui7tLhqWB2Q&ref=components.news) of its new facility in Los Angeles, the Cash App Compound, including shots of players practicing in the building's Totino's Fortnite Training Room and streamers broadcasting from windowless cinderblock prison cells. In December 2021, the company [announced](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAvy8vCiJjk&ref=components.news) a $60 million Series C round in a video laying out its ambition to build a "Marvel-esque universe" of content creators and its plans for apparel and merch drops. In line with the startup economy, it acknowledged its continued unprofitability in service of exponential growth to become "the most recognized brand in gaming." In the 14-minute video, less than two minutes were spent discussing the company's teams. At present, 100 Thieves' skeletal [website](https://100thieves.com/?ref=components.news) functions purely as a direct-to-consumer clothing store; one must dig to find any mention of games at all. Meanwhile, while every new spreadsheet app will either receive venture funding or disappear from the face of the earth, independent game studios can profitably operate while avoiding venture investment entirely. Examples of established studios are legion, ranging from *Hitman* maker IO Interactive, which [generated](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-10-12-io-interactive-reports-record-breaking-year?ref=components.news) $78 million in profit last year, to Paradox, who, according to some [napkin math](https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/crusader-kings-3-sales-exceed-2-million-copies/zf4191?ref=components.news), brought in more than $120 million with their latest release, *Crusader Kings III*. Indie game studios have also been able to successfully leverage crowdfunding in a way that would be totally alien to the makers of some cloud-based pomodoro timer. The three-person Australian studio Team Cherry got funding for its metroidvania masterwork *Hollow Knight* via Kickstarter and sold nearly three million copies two years after its 2017 launch. [RimWorld](https://www.ind13.com/how-much-money-do-steam-games-make/?ref=components.news), another crowdfunded game released in 2018, is estimated to have grossed over $100 million. (As seen in the earlier graph on Hunter category correlations, our data shows a relationship between affinities for crowdfunding and games. As we noted earlier, not every relationship that shows up is necessarily meaningful, but this one does correspond to a real phenomenon.) The saner business logic of the gaming industry is connected to a number of distinctions between the organizations of the gamer and the nihilist — notably that, unlike productivity apps whose licenses are usually ordered and paid for by someone completely different from the end user, a gamer is almost always both purchaser and user. The prospect of all but the most spendthrift gamer leaving 55 percent of their purchased libraries completely unplayed is unfathomable. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/cyberpunk-apology.png) This relates to arguably the most striking difference between their respective organizations: the game studio's greater accountability to its own [hype](https://johannesklingebiel.de/portfolio/a-field-guide-to-hype.html?ref=components.news). CD Projekt Red's response to the crisis of *Cyberpunk 2077* — in which years of orchestrated anticipation was followed by the release of an 85-percent completed product that didn't function on two major consoles — led to frantic patching and the issuing of mass refunds. Co-founder Marcin Iwiński's [apology](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3V4UBZmC9o&ref=components.news), when placed next to any non-response of some equivalently dysfunctional AI startup, carried the desperation of an Al-Qaeda hostage video. Bethesda took [a similar approach](https://www.reddit.com/r/fo76/comments/a0veqq/communication%5Fmoving%5Fforward/?ref=components.news) after the bug-ridden release of the also hyped *Fallout 76*. When players of *No Man's Sky* complained of an empty, barren universe, the developers [overhauled](https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/23/21450919/hello-games-no-mans-sky-next-game-sean-murray-interview?ref=components.news) the game to inject its world with new dynamism. While it is nearly impossible to objectively assess the value that most of Silicon Valley's productivity tools provide to their users, the gamer is able to evaluate goods on a basic, subjective benchmark, one that Blizzard acknowledged in its [mea culpa](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/warcraft3/t/warcraft-iii-reforged-developer-update/18425?ref=components.news) to disappointed players of *Warcraft III: Reforged*: "We want to say we’re sorry to those of you who didn’t have the experience you wanted." --- ## Nihilism capture **Summary**: *Attempts by nihilists to govern the gamer's space results in palsied games, with Microsoft and its killing field of studios providing the largest example. The metaverse envisioned by Microsoft, Facebook, and crypto-oriented projects promises game-like systems that are ruled by productivity instead of fun, and functions as a proxy battle between the gamer and the nihilist. So far, gamers themselves have already reacted against these incursions by vehemently denouncing NFTs and forcing developers and marketplaces to exclude them.* What happens when the nihilist encroaches onto the gamer's territory? Perhaps no other company has done so as successfully as Microsoft. In February, the company's CEO, Satya Nadella, justified his mandate to build the nebulous concept known as the metaverse by [claiming](https://www.ft.com/content/7d2a185c-7ab1-4fb2-80ca-aaa1fa7267ba?ref=components.news), "Being great at game building gives us permission to build the next internet." It is true that Microsoft makes and distributes games, a lineage that runs from the original 1982 *Flight Simulator* to everything currently related to Xbox, including its pending $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. It is also true that the way it has handled its gaming division is precisely what one would expect from the creators of Windows. The YouTube game critic videogamedunkey's 2019 discussion of Microsoft's gaming operation provides a concise but thorough overview of the company's body count when it comes to not only the number but the type of failures it has amassed over the years, which ultimately rendered the Xbox One "the system to get because your friends have Xbox." Microsoft's acquisition of Rare, which in the 1990s created groundbreaking titles like *Donkey Kong Country* and *Banjo Kazooie*, ended with the studio "reduced to making shovelware Kinect games," a reference to the Xbox's motion-capture peripheral whose [canyon-sized disparity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgJqliVWSSg&ref=components.news) between marketing and reality made it a case study in consumer tech hype. Beyond Rare, Microsoft's acquisition spree of other studios functioned as a *Sports Illustrated* cover curse, ending the hit-making heydays of each. As Dunkey surmised, "Either these guys just have the shittiest luck ever, or they're not willing to dig deep and spend the money to get stuff made right." On this last point, Dunkey is probably wrong. Bungie — the studio behind *Halo* that was acquired in 2000, when it was nearing completion of the game, in order to turn *Halo* into an Xbox launch title — left Microsoft in 2019\. From there, Microsoft's own in-house studio ended up creating *Halo Infinite* at a cost of $500 million, making it the [most expensive](https://www.thegamer.com/halo-infinite-most-expensive-game-ever-made/?ref=components.news) game ever created. (The result was a product basically similar to the other titles in the franchise.) And while not every game the company produces carries such a high price tag, there's not necessarily any sign that the studios it acquires are victims of slash-and-burn cost cutting. In fact, games that Microsoft published but didn't actually develop, like *Ori* and *Cuphead*, have still been able to achieve both commercial and critical success even with shoestring teams. Rather than miserliness, Nadella unwittingly pinpointed the problem himself as he made his case for why his company would be the first to build the metaverse. "\[In\] the Microsoft I grew up in, I always think about three things," he said. "The three things that we always had are: we built tools for people to write software; we built tools for people to drive their personal and organizational productivity; and we built games." Put another way, Microsoft's track record is the predictable result of combining an organizational culture whose cornerstone ethos is productivity-destroying software and bullshit work with their diametrically fun opposites. And Microsoft offers perhaps the best case scenario of such an equation, which for other tech companies has resulted in a total wash: as the *Financial Times* [noted](https://www.ft.com/content/2d446160-08cb-489f-90c8-853b3d88780d?ref=components.news), "Early attempts by Google and Amazon to create games studios of their own have failed to make a dent." The company's relentless destruction of game studios aside, the threat to fun posed by a tokenized metaverse, crypto, NFTs, and everything else comprising the fatberg of web3 is, while procedurally different than the gutting of Rare et al., similar in effect. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/nft-mansion-hell.png) **A still from a* [**promotion*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wwA%5FYxtcIw&ref=components.news) *for an NFT residence where a pool party is taking place.* As far as our Product Hunt data is concerned, the relationships between Hunter tastes between productivity, crypto, and games is fairly inconclusive, with no definitive relationships either way. Observationally speaking, there was no shortage of *CS:GO* players who went long on Dogecoin during its manic peak. But gamers engaging in a standalone pump-and-dump scheme is categorically different from tokenizing a game itself. The arguments of crypto boosters for their incursion into gaming — which ultimately results in games as utilitarian financial operations rather than meaningful uselessness — relies on the same nihilistic opposition to the gamer's framing of time, and the same refusal to consciously embrace waste as value. This misalignment was [articulated](https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/play-to-earn-crypto-reddit-cofounder-alexis-ohanian-dao-gaming-2022-1?ref=components.news) by Reddit cofounder and VC Alexis Ohanian, who claimed that, in 2027, "90% of people will not play a game unless they are being valued properly for that time," predicting that play-to-earn crypto games would soon displace every other form. Because the nihilist is unable to make good games, the output of their efforts so far have made Ohanian's prognosis as bleak as it is unlikely. ("Most of the people who are talking about metaverse have absolutely no idea what they're talking about," Valve president Gabe Newell [told](https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-metaverse/?ref=components.news) PC Gamer. "And they've apparently never played an MMO.") And so far, gamers' reception of crypto into their world has taken on the exact opposite form that Ohanian predicted. Instead, gamers' vehement [backlash](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/technology/cryptocurrency-nft-gamers.html?ref=components.news) against NFTs has forced multiple companies to explicitly position themselves against the technology. Among them, Sega dropped its plans to include NFTs in future Sonic games. The indie game store Itch.io issued a [condemnation](https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/8/22923265/nfts-scam-indie-game-store-itchio-tweet-gumroad?utm%5Fcampaign=theverge&utm%5Fcontent=chorus&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fsource=twitter). Valve outright [banned](https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/onboarding?ref=components.news) NFTs on Steam, the world's largest marketplace for PC games. And even Epic [promised](https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1442519522875949061?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1442519522875949061|twgr^|twcon^s1%5F&ref%5Furl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2022%2F01%2F15%2Ftechnology%2Fcryptocurrency-nft-gamers.html&ref=components.news) it would not integrate them into Fortnite. One company that admitted it "under-evaluated how strong the backlash could have been" to its NFT rollout was Ubisoft, one of the most commercially successful game studios in the world as well as one of the most [reviled](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2nh7xy/why%5Fdo%5Fpeople%5Fhate%5Fubisoft%5Fso%5Fmuch/?ref=components.news). For Ubisoft, NFTs are merely the latest in a nihilistic transformation that has played out over time. In 2018, it released *Assassin's Creed Odyssey*, a third-person open world action/adventure game with a traditional leveling system based on experience points, which are earned in side quests. Ubisoft offered microtransactions in the game that allowed people to skip the quests entirely and purchase XP with real money "so that you don't have to actually play the game you just bought for $60," as Dunkey put it. The feature was called "Time Savers." --- ## Conclusion Our argument isn't intended to create a rigid dualism between the gamer and the nihilist, but rather to point out an underappreciated dichotomy. Very few people fall neatly into one camp or the other; many would fall into neither. All sorts of issues arise when actually applying this framework that we won't try to reconcile, such as which heuristic best fits professional athletes, eSports players, Twitch streamers, musicians, and so on, all of whom can blur the line between utility and fun. Similarly, nothing contained in this report should be taken in absolutist terms. Not all productivity tools are vehicles of nothingness (many of them are quite useful), and not all the people who design and fund them are nihilists. What's important is the contemplation of the fun experience as opposed to faux productivity and bullshit work. While we were preparing this report, the tech economy (including crypto) was suddenly bludgeoned by reality, courtesy of rising interest rates that effectively neutralized the pandemic bubble. The era of easy money is now over, while the price of crypto has crashed along with the stock price of every perennially unprofitable company birthed in the post-2008 tech craze. This contraction will likely have consequences for venture funding and the ability of investors to exit companies via IPO or acquisition as the appetite for risk dries up. Somewhat overnight, the fund-everything, hire-everyone mania that pervaded has been replaced with the cold arithmetic of cash flow. As money and work ideally become re-oriented towards some vaguely rational idea of value, the opposition between the nihilist and the gamer is important to reflect on in service of injecting sanity, and even some shred of morality, into our markets. In his essay on fun, Graeber summed up Friedrich Schiller's own views on fun, that "it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. 'Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man…and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.' If so,… then glimmers of freedom, or even of moral life, begin to appear everywhere around us." For Kant as well, an ability to separate means from ends represented a pillar of the ethical life. And Zeus deemed work without meaning a sentence to be doled out to those deserving of the most intolerable hell. There is no shortage of kind and good-hearted nihilists, and no shortage of black-hearted gamers. But the respective economies organized around each framework can’t help but tip the moral balance in one direction, however counterintuitive that morality may sometimes appear under RGB lights. As Wajcman said at the end of her paper, "Calendars will never ask us what we want to save time for." Neither will Jira, Monday.com, or any of the other apps built less to optimize than to be optimized. Games at least ask the question, and they can begin to help us form an answer. ### On Epic's acquisition of Bandcamp URL: https://components.news/on-epics-acquisition-of-bandcamp/ Last updated: 2025-10-06T16:07:37.000Z Components began monitoring Bandcamp's homepage sales feed, which publishes information on every sale made on the site, in late August 2020\. As of this writing, the database we've compiled includes about 29 million sales, and four million albums and tracks. In late 2020 and early 2021, we published two projects with this data. The first was an interactive map of genre tags from cities around the world that lets users examine cities' musical identities, as well as the nature of genre itself. The second was an [exploratory data analysis](https://components.news/bandcamp-the-chaos-bazaar/) of about 7 million sales in the third quarter of 2020 that, to my knowledge, remains the largest publicly-available, quantitative analysis of the platform's economics. The report posed a simple thesis: Bandcamp is profitable and Spotify is not, because Bandcamp's minimalist business model — allowing the exchange of money for music and merch on terms that artists and labels set themselves — provides the opportunity for people to spend as much as they want. The premise that people *want* to buy things makes the company something of an overlooked pioneer in applied behavioral economics. By contrast, Spotify adheres to an outmoded understanding of humans as economic agents that seek nothing but cost minimization. Its $10/month spending cap for an individual subscription not only prohibits the behavior that Bandcamp is built upon, but causes it to lose money nearly every quarter. In all previous Components projects, a dataset has been curated, utilized, and then archived as we move on to other pursuits. The Bandcamp data has proven the exception; its abundance and detail has always suggested that lurking within is a complex set of best practices for musicians and labels to follow in an era besieged by streaming services. For the past year I considered making Components the home of something like the Billboard 100 for the platform, with monthly charts of the artists who had made the most money. The idea was that outsized success might point to a discovery worthy of emulation, and a layer of transparency about how much exactly people are making on Bandcamp could point the way towards everyone making more. The day Epic Games and Bandcamp announced that the former would acquire the latter, we were in the midst of publishing that very side project. The results for February came out like this: If there's one thing I'm fairly pessimistic about regarding this acquisition, it's that the spigot of free data that would allow such charts to be regularly published will almost certainly close: as a capital T Tech company, Epic is guided by an impulse deep in its brain stem to protect any and all data from its rivals. This would be consistent with their past behavior: the company publishes no data publically about its in-game shop or any other part of the platform, and information compiled by third parties on the internet is limited to rough estimates of the game’s monthly active user count and revenue. But beyond this, my reaction has been markedly different from the apoplectic shock I've seen expressed by others. What I instead saw in the news was a genuine *possibility* that the acquisition could fulfill the very same recommendations we made for Bandcamp at the end of our report. Before I reiterate those recommendations here and explain why the acquisition might precipitate them, it's worth affirming all the good reasons for skepticism, as well as acknowledging Epic’s track record. For a more thorough rundown, see Mark Hurst's [response](https://creativegood.com/blog/22/bandcamp-risks-becoming-an-epic-failure.html?ref=components.news) published the day after the announcement, the [Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/future%5Fof%5Fmusic/status/1499096233037684743?ref=components.news) from the Future of Music Coalition, and Ted Goia's [reaction](https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/bandcamp-just-got-acquired-by-a-video). In brief: Acquisitions tend to compromise the original integrity of acquired companies. Epic has received major investment from the Chinese tech behemoth and CCP bedfellow Tencent, which makes WeChat and has stakes in both Spotify itself and major record labels. As Hurst identifies, Epic's flagship game, Fortnite, is "loaded with dark patterns encouraging addiction in its mostly teen and pre-teen user base." The company has been plagued with various scandals relating to its internal practices. Of non-trivial significance in a discussion involving creative industry acquisitions, Fortnite itself is a Disneyfied battle royale that sucks on most aesthetic levels. The responses I've seen have tended to preemptively react to worst case scenarios, as well as express a general sense of unease at the idea of the world's largest marketplace of independent music becoming a subsidiary of a growth-obsessed parent company. People have feared that Epic could slash artists' share of sales (very possible), turn Bandcamp into new Spotify (extremely unlikely), and do away with the commission-free Bandcamp Fridays (something that may be[ overdue anyway](https://ra.co/news/76829?ref=components.news)). What I haven't seen is much consideration of a future in which this event provides significant upside for the economics of music as a whole, and how it might address the long standing shortcomings in Bandcamp's execution of its stated mission. Epic is not Blackstone; this acquisition is almost certainly not a private equity-style raid. Instead, what I see is the possibility of a corporation taking out a short on the endlessly subsidized streaming model and going long on a sustainable and profitable alternative. In other words, I see the possibility of Epic re-normalizing the purchase of music. At the end of our report, we provided four recommendations that we hoped the company would take. I want to interpret Epic's purchase in light of them: \* > The company should extricate itself from a state of technological and branding inertia. Bandcamp, as much as it has endeared itself to artists and listeners (and, it should go without saying at this point, to us), has felt like it calcified right after it was created. The site is slow. Elements of its layout are weirdly counterintuitive. You can't download music in the app \[*Note: this feature was added a few months after the report was published*\], and the app allows only low-quality streaming. The API offers no meaningful ways to integrate the platform with outside services. One reader I spoke with expressed confusion as to why any of this matters. My answer is that all of these pieces increase the service's surface area. People who want to bolster the model that supports direct payments to musicians should also want the largest company doing so to be a household brand name, and should want the ability to make those purchases disseminate as widely as possible. While Spotify has created an API that can be inserted anywhere and everywhere to a level of inescapability, Bandcamp hasn't — novel ways of promoting music and its sale (our report gave the hypothetical of allowing NTS Radio listeners to buy tracks while a mix was playing) have never been explored. Jules Becker, a member of Components who is far more familiar with Fortnite's intricacies than I am, sees little limit to the potential placement of sales endpoints throughout the game. He envisions a logical expansion of an already vast in-game marketplace (and payment system) for skins, emotes, and sound and music that can be tied to various player actions like dances, used on loading screens, and gifted to other players; the monetization and growth of a currently robust virtual concert schedule; the growth of vehicle radio stations; and an ability for artists themselves to sell other assets, like digital merch, to players — something currently available on a limited basis for big artists, but that could be standardized and offered more widely. And of course, there's the possibility of virtual Bandcamp storefronts. For better or worse, Epic is a metaverse-minded company, which simply means it's obsessed with the very concept of integration. They have the capacity to make their products as accessible and inescapable as Spotify. \*\* > The company should actively entice more large artists to release music on the platform to not only bring in more revenue, but also to normalize the platform beyond its niche position. Convince a few larger artists to release an EP not available on streaming platforms and see what happens. My few conversations with people at large labels have led me to believe that the majors see streaming services as a deal they want out of. One person went so far as to simply tell me that the managers of the largest music company in the world "hate Spotify." Meanwhile, Taylor Swift's zealous fans keep her playlists on repeat while they're at school so she accumulates penny fractions out of their support. When I've suggested that Bandcamp offers a no-brainer intermediary between the two, people in the industry have either been unfamiliar with the platform, or said that manually uploading a major label’s entire catalog to Bandcamp (something made vastly easier on streaming services) feels infeasible for catalogs containing oceanic amounts of music. While these responses justify the report’s first recommendation about branding and integration, it may be necessary to also repeat what I think is the overarching goal for anyone who counts themself a member of the faction against the hegemony of streaming: Between 2006 and 2007, two paths emerged for the future of the music business. One was Spotify, and the other was Radiohead's pay-what-you-want release of *In Rainbows*, which directly inspired Bandcamp's founding. The war is won when the industry retraces its steps back to the fork in the road and takes the right turn. This epochal reversal can't happen if major labels continue to hold out, and they will continue to do so until they have a platform that both can and actively tries to accommodate them. I see no reason why Epic wouldn't try to do this; when your in-game concerts include Travis Scott and Marshmello, the tendency is naturally to push those artists toward releasing music through the music company you own. \*\*\* > Bandcamp should recognize that it can grow the most under certain market conditions that favor it...The company should consider meeting with other companies that stand to benefit from rigorous antitrust enforcement, like DuckDuckGo, Affinity, and a whole host of others, form a trade group, and hire some lobbyists. Right now, the only related group that exists is the[ Coalition for App Fairness](https://appfairness.org/?ref=components.news), a trade group formed by Basecamp and Epic Games primarily interested in reducing Apple's 30-percent app store fees. Reducing these fees is, in the long run, probably important for Bandcamp to reach a certain level of growth: The entire reason that Bandcamp does not allow in-app purchases is so that it can preserve its revenue split with artists without having to also cut in a trillion-dollar company. Our report is the only webpage I'm aware of to publish the names of Bandcamp and Epic in the same breath before the acquisition announcement. While Epic's lawsuit against Apple ultimately failed to remove the 30-percent fee, it remains one of the company's chief antagonists. But Apple aside, Epic is antagonistic generally, operating in a fiercely competitive industry. This has led it to inject the kinds of gross dark patterns to which Hurst alluded to hook its players. It also means the company is capable of identifying its opponents in a way that Bandcamp has proven unable or unwilling to. As we wrote in our report, "\[Bandcamp CEO Ethan\] Diamond once compared Spotify to the radio, a place to find new artists. Except that while Bandcamp may see streaming platforms as a complement, Amazon, Apple, and Spotify, which have spent the past decade devouring entire markets, rarely see themselves as complements to anything." This absence of antagonism in Bandcamp’s culture has functioned as a major operational deficit, stymieing its growth, and therefore obstructing the amount of money directly flowing to musicians. It's not unreasonable to expect this opposition between Bandcamp and Spotify to heighten under Epic's ownership despite Tencent's investment in both — after all, a savvy investor understands the importance of hedging their bets. \*\*\*\* > Finally, if any of these suggestions are too much for the company's past investors to swallow (conjecturally/hypothetically/etc.), the founders and/or employees should see if there's a way to buy them out. Hopefully the opposite is true, and the investors actually understand that starting a new Spotify is not smart, that the political tides have changed, and that the odds of Bandcamp becoming the portfolio whale they hoped for in the beginning, by creating value instead of violating antitrust regulations, is greater now than it was ten years ago. I consider the acquisition to be a version of this already happening. The longer I spent analyzing Bandcamp and reflecting on both its business model and the context of the music business currently, the more I came to believe it was a sleeping giant that for some reason no one had thought to prod awake. Assuming Epic doesn't manage the company like Gordon Gekko, there's no reason to believe they don't believe the same thing. --- All of this is wishful thinking, literally, in that these are all things I wish are true. They don't have to be. When the ink dries on the deal, Bandcamp will be Epic's property, and there will be little preventing it from slashing artist compensation to 40 percent and firing everyone except the bare minimum number of sysadmins needed to keep the site running in its current form. This is the type of future envisaged in the most pessimistic responses I've seen. But the numbers I've examined for the past year point to compelling reasons for Epic to follow a less destructive path, one that helps re-normalize a sane music economy and provides the entire industry with the opportunity for a do-over. It is important to keep in mind that in an era of Twitch streamers, Patreon creators, and Subtack writers, music streaming services increasingly make music the exception, not the rule, to the direction much of the digital cultural economy is headed. There's a print of a concert poster above my desk promoting a show of artists from Posh Isolation, a Danish label. I bought the poster on Bandcamp, as I have much of the label's music. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/music-in-crisis.jpeg) Crises require a set of uncomfortable responses. They necessitate that one, as Venkatesh Rao puts it, be slightly evil. The candidate whose piety keeps them from bringing up their opponent's missing emails is the one who loses. It is not an exaggeration to say that the world Spotify wants is one in which art has no home. If Bandcamp has responded in a way that smells of moral compromise, it may spell the end, but it may also mean they're on the right track. ### The New Pornographers URL: https://components.news/the-new-pornographers/ Last updated: 2025-12-08T03:55:57.000Z ### Summary This report argues that consumer technology reviewers have failed their basic nominal purpose of critiquing tools. Instead, inspired by values introduced by Apple in the late 1990s, the tech review industry prioritizes aesthetic lust as the primary critical factor for evaluating objects. The reification of these values in their scoring system is transmitted to consumers and manufacturers alike. Like other prurient things, the objects designed within this paradigm are optimized not for usefulness but for photogenic and telegenic properties, a framework that finds its fullest realization in YouTube reviews and unboxing videos. There, even the intimation of critical rigor within tech reviewing vanishes, the smartphone becomes the center of gravity, and manufacturers are even further incentivized to design products for end consumers who are less users than viewers. ### Introduction Components has published analyses of critic reviews twice in the past: first about [Pitchfork](https://components.news/scored-and-arranged/), and later about [film and television critics](https://components.news/faucets-of-despair/). Both were driven by the challenge to reverse engineer values coded inside the numerical scores assigned by reviewers, and both worked off a premise that such critics probably shouldn't be assigning scores to art in the first place. The stakes for both analyses, though, were quite low. The dwarfed influence of critics has spawned countless reflections (mostly by critics themselves) that ponder their diminishing relevance in an age of user reviews and unlimited content, where the economic costs of listening to or watching something are almost nonexistent. Product reviews, including the consumer technology reviews analyzed here, are different. The perspectives of sources like PCMag and influencers like Mrwhosetheboss are simultaneously widely sought after and unavoidable. Tech reviews are not produced for consumption with Sunday morning coffee. Rather, each outlet and channel obsessively optimizes every detail of their output — their text, their titles, their HTML, their metadata, all of it — to surface ever higher in the search rankings consumers encounter when they perform their inevitable pre-purchase research. "The epicenter of consumer-driven marketing is the Internet, crucial during the active-evaluation phase as consumers seek information, reviews, and recommendations," writes the management consultancy [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-consumer-decision-journey?ref=components.news). The tech review sits comfortably in a McKinsey-conceived economic schema in a way a *Midsommar* review never could. No one at CNET is lamenting the death of the critic. In 2016, the Pew Research Center conducted a [study](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/12/19/online-reviews/?ref=components.news) on e-commerce in the United States, including the importance of online reviews, which included both professional and user reviews. On all three separate measures examined — making consumers feel confident about their purchases, holding companies accountable, and ensuring product safety — respondents overwhelmingly expressed more trust in reviewers than government regulators. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/score-distributions.jpg) Tech reviewers operate on a premise that nearly every object is a recommended purchase: A majority of reviews received a score of 8 and up, and 85 percent got at least a 7\. Conversely, less than 1 percent of products were assigned a score of 4 or less.Categories of articles and reviews were determined by using k-nearest neighbors, a machine learning algorithm, on the text of reviews. They were trained on PCMag's category labels, thereby assigned a category based on the text of similar articles in PCMag. Various categories were combined into single categories to increase accuracy. For example, "Mobile & Tablets" was deemed a single category since attempting to categorize them separately resulted in inaccuracies. This makes sense, as tablets have been designed to essentially be large smartphones, and are therefore described in nearly identical ways. The categories that most constitute the center of consumer hardware were included in the score distribution analysis, as indicated in the image subtitle. Other categories, like printers, drones, and all software, were left out. Scores for PCMag, Trusted Reviews, and TechRadar were normalized to a 10-point scale. In other words, a random product has better than even odds of receiving a strong recommendation by a tech reviewer, and nearly 9 out of 10 products are considered well within the threshold of purchasability. A reader who happens upon a review in the course of their research will more often than not receive a critical green light. There are two notable datapoints at the extreme ends of the axis. First, no product from CNET, PCMag or Trusted Reviews received a score of 0, and at TechRadar, the number of 0-scoring reviews was so low as to be statistical noise. Second, no score among CNET reviews was ever assigned a 10, and at PCMag, products that earned superlative scores amounted to less than two-tenths of one percent. At TechRadar and Trusted Reviews, the percentage of 10-scoring reviews was about 5.5 percent and 6.1 percent, respectively. In aggregate, only 3 percent of products receive perfect scores. Taken together, the two datapoints illustrate how this paradigm struggles with concepts of worthlessness or perfection. In fact, the world is more populated by worthless and perfect products than pretty good or even great ones. Hammers, coffee mugs, umbrellas — these objects either work or they don't. If they do, they're effectively perfect. If they don't, they're worthless. This is not to preclude objects from improving over time as ideas, technologies, and standards change, and for the meaning of perfection or worthlessness to shift. But tech reviews, as we'll see in more detail later, rest on a belief that they *must* improve, and that the exact function an object is supposed to serve is never all that clear. At the same time, because that purpose is not clear, it means the object can never measurably fail to fulfill it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/scores-over-time.jpg) The already generous review system has only become even more generous over time, with the average review score increasing by more than half a point from 2013 to 2020, from 7.38 to 7.96\. There are two things happening in this graph. The first is a belief prevalent among tech reviewers that technology is getting better every year. This belief was exemplified in a 2020 [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTbrXiIzUt4&ref=components.news) when Marques Brownlee, one of YouTube's mega tech influencers, interviewed Louis Rossman, a right-to-repair advocate and a paragon of an alternative model for engaging with technology; we'll revisit both figures later. In his interview, Brownlee suggested that the creeping disposability of our products might simply be the inevitable cost of progress. Brownlee draws from arguments by vendors against right-to-repair laws, citing device security, structural integrity, material desirability and manufacturing innovations as by definition necessitating a society-wide shift towards less repairable devices. "With tech, tech keeps getting better and better and more and more well integrated and at the same time it's getting harder and harder to repair," he posits over B-roll of promotional footage for the M1 MacBook. "What does that future look like? It's kind of at a crossroads. Does the future of tech trend to get so good that it's trending to impossible to repair?" ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/mossberg-pichai.jpg) **Tech journalist Walt Mossberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai at the* [**2016 Recode conference*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwS3OF7zCY4&ref=components.news)**.* The second phenomenon lurking in this graph is the increased synchronization between reviewers and product makers. While tech reviewers never held particularly scathing perspectives, their revenue also didn't directly depend on people purchasing those products until recently. But the cannibalism of ad dollars by Google and Facebook has forced media companies to come up with "innovative" business models, and for review sites, this has almost universally arrived in the form of affiliate links. Today, every product review on every review site, whether it's scored at a 10 or a 5, includes a link to a seller with a code that, if the reader ultimately buys the product from that link, gives a portion of the sale to the linking site. The consequence is an alignment of incentives between publication and manufacturer, a vested interest in not merely acting as a reviewer, but as an advertiser. At the same time, review sites depend on reliable, early access to products in order to publish reviews ready for the day of product launches. Given these publications' overall friendliness to manufacturers, it's hard to find ample evidence of companies withdrawing review products. However, it [happened](https://www.newsweek.com/apple-vs-everybody-going-after-gizmodo-70209?ref=components.news) in the case of Gizmodo, when the Gawker-owned tech site published a leaked preview of the iPhone 4 in 2010\. In response, Apple, along with filing a lawsuit against the site that demanded the writer's hard drive, closed off Gizmodo's access to review products, effectively shutting them out of early search results and losing a critical stream of review readership. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/review-words.png) But what are the actual values enshrined in these scores? The relativistic parameters appear explicitly when looking at the 15 words most associated with high scores in reviews. While some words are generically positive across all critical domains ("superb", "fantastic", "amazing"), others bear particular significance within the context of consumer technology. Three concepts emerge: - Products are consistently compared with prior versions of themselves, and reviewers place a premium on change for change's sake, awarding points for technical or, more often the case, merely visual differences compared to previous models. - Rewards are given for a particular type of aesthetic dazzlement. While "beautiful" and "gorgeous" would seem to be generically positive words in the same way as "superb", they in fact reify specific critical values in the context of tech reviews, often elicited by products made of metal and glass. - Two words, "whopping" and "thousand", are associated with two distinct meanings, both conveying high prices and high technical specs (pixels, memory, etc.). While this confounds the signal of either meaning, here's an interpretation: products that are expensive and products that look good on spec sheets both get high marks; at the very least, a high price tag doesn't result in a marked penalty. This paradigm, which rewards a combination of spec maximization, superficial sheen, and infinite redesign, and which does not even consider cost, did not come from nowhere. It was Designed by Apple in California, and with the crucial assistance of tech reviewers, it has since metastasized into nearly every other manufacturer. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/tim-cook.jpg) **Apple CEO Tim Cook in a promotional* [**video*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwS3OF7zCY4&ref=components.news) *for the release of the M1 iPad Pro in 2021.* The idea of evaluating consumer electronics based on the sort of aesthetic criteria as one would a sofa did not really occur until 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and met industrial design VP Jony Ive. In tandem, they began releasing candy-colored iMacs and iBooks as explicit rejoinders to the beige conventions of PC manufacturers. One of the first machines produced under the Jobs/Ive regime was the Power Macintosh G3, whose curved edges and unconventional blue was a prototype for everything that has come since. In 1999, Apple released a promotional video that in retrospect can be read as a Magna Carta of the company’s entire design philosophy from the late 90s to today. The video is worth watching in its entirety, from the Henry Kissinger “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” epigraph to the Marketing VP’s assertion that “If sex is power and the computer gives you power, there’s lots of sex in this machine” juxtaposed against a clip of Lara Croft, to a mustachioed Ive’s remark that “These have to be objects that are totally seductive...A computer absolutely can be sexy.” Ive’s principal contribution during his tenure at Apple was to bake a Cupertino, California erotic sensibility directly into the company's products, communicated via computers' curves and materials and abetted by their spec sheets, particularly in a way that would appeal to viewers of advertisements. “To try and design an object that elicits a reaction of, ‘I, I really want that’ is enormously fun,” Ive says while mimicking a slack jawed consumer so overcome with desire that they’ve stopped forming full sentences. In other words, it is in no way off the psychoanalytic deep end to argue that what Ive refined was the company's ability to stoke *visually-oriented sexual desire*. A more succinct way of saying this is that Ive introduced a framework of pornographic design, engineered for baser interests at the expense of others. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/iphone-water.jpg) This pornographifcation of product design in consumer technology was not merely one of many influences on tech reviewers — it became the very paradigm under our current analysis. As Joshua Topolsky [wrote](https://theoutline.com/post/2352/apple-is-really-bad-at-design?ref=components.news) of his time as editor of *Engadget*, “Stretching perhaps from the introduction of the first iPod in 2001, through the release of the groundbreaking iPhone 4 (and subsequent refinement with the iPhone 5), Apple was regularly lauded as best-in-class when it came to hardware and software design and the synchronicity of those elements.” The products that emerged from the Jobs/Ive Apple were the focal points the tech review apparatus used for its entire calibration, against which more or less all other products were judged. For all of Jobs's sins as a CEO (completely closed systems, Foxconn factories, one could go on for days), his presence still mitigated against the worst of these tendencies, and his one virtue was a genuine focus on the experience of the end user. Despite Ive's sexualization, the usefulness of products like the iPod and iPhone are not difficult to argue for. After Jobs died, however, Ive was given even more reign over product design when he was elevated to Chief Design Officer, a role that meant he oversaw the design of all hardware and software interfaces, including iOS, macOS, and tvOS. Before he ultimately left the company in 2019, the result of Ive's rising influence was a series of design blunders — the iPhone notch, the Magic Mouse that can't be used while charged, the AirPods Max that can't take advantage of Apple Music's own lossless audio, the list really does go on — as well as an even further pornographication of products. The materials the company used began to take precedence over the computing power they contained, with each generation of the iPhone boasting more and more durable glass, culminating in the “Ceramic Shield” on last year’s iPhone 12\. Even Apple’s recent pivot into financial services has been largely justified on aesthetic grounds: the launch of the Apple Card was delivered with the tagline “Goodbye plastic, hello titanium,” with accompanying text bragging that the titanium its card is made from is “a sustainable metal known for its beauty.”Apple used another material known for its beauty when it designed its 18-karat gold edition, which it retailed for $20,000\. Like standard first-edition Apple watches, the device received three-and-a-half years of software updates before it was no longer officially supported. The Apple Watch, too, has from the start been touted as much an as object as a personal optimization device. In a 10-minute promo [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH5ia7r5wfw&ref=components.news), Ive described the watch as “an unparalleled level of technical innovation, combined with a design that connects with the wearer at an intimate level to both embrace individuality and inspire desire.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/oneplus-phones-cropped.jpg) The diminishment of usefulness of Apple products throughout the 2010s inspired no revision of tech reviewers' assessments. Instead, the company's scores hovered in the mid 8's throughout the decade. Ive's pornographic design framework continues to calibrate the system — and by extension, the signals sent out to both consumers and competing manufacturers. In response, the values of Apple's design paradigm have continued their transmission to other manufacturers, who have emulated its obsession with curves, shimmering surfaces, and even the blunders themselves, like the now nearly-universal notch. But only one company, the Chinese phone manufacturer OnePlus, has done so in a way that has rewarded it with top ranking among tech reviewers.Samsung has been relentless in its attempts to copy Apple's designs, but the company releases so many products, from TVs to refrigerators, that it seems to regress to the mean due to sheer volume. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/scores-by-brand.png) Apple and OnePlus are the highest reviewed brands among tech reviewers, and OnePlus's place is a direct result of its attempt to replicate Apple's sexualized designs. "When we started out, there were many Android makers who wouldn't pay attention to the product," [said](https://www.businessinsider.com/a-28-year-old-dropout-has-allegedly-made-the-worlds-best-smartphone-2018-8?ref=components.news) Carl Pei, OnePlus's co-founder. "They were made of plastic and overall not good phones. We thought that there must be Android users who wanted a neat product, just like Apple fans do." In 2020, Pei founded a new company, [Nothing](https://nothing.tech/?ref=components.news), whose first product is a pair of transparent AirPod-shaped noise-cancelling earbuds. As CNBC [wrote](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/11/oneplus-co-founder-carl-peis-new-startup-nothing-takes-aim-at-apple.html?ref=components.news), "Pei hopes his new company...will shape the consumer tech industry in the same way that Apple’s iMac G3 shook up the PC market in the late 90s and early 2000s. 'Today it’s like the PC industry in the 80s and 90s, where everybody made grey boxes,' he said." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/nothing-g4-square.jpg) For all the faults of tech publishers, they maintain two important qualities: the minimal resemblance of a critical process, and a conception of technology that extends beyond the smartphone. YouTube tech influencers dispense with both of these, and it is there that the distinction between review and advertisement fully collapses.Our analysis of YouTube tech videos included those whose titles or metadata were labeled as reviews and/or unboxings — in which a person literally opens a box and describes the object it contains — since the latter have become a conventional review form and tend to rank just as highly in results when searching for reviews. Unlike the content of publications, YouTube reviews and unboxing videos are also routinely, explicitly sponsored by manufacturers. Given YouTube's function as a video platform, the telegenic quality of contemporary tech that began with late 90s Apple is even more critical to products' reception by viewers. The seductiveness Ive introduced has always been made for TV, and that pornographic design has spawned the unboxing video, in which tech products are removed from their packaging, described, and embellished with professional high-grade lighting and camera work. Unlike traditional tech reviews, YouTube tech reviews and unboxing videos themselves become objects for consumption, and when people jokingly refer to them as "tech porn," they do so literally, whether they realize it or not. This formal apotheosis is the ASMR unboxing video, which typically feature two gloved hands rotating, caressing, and tapping on product and packaging for upwards of ten minutes. These sensual movements provoke the tentative squeak of a phone being removed from its plastic cradle, followed by the moan of plastic being peeled of the screen. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/category-types.jpg) YouTubers have, relative to publishers, winnowed down what they review and unbox to a single product category. While smartphones and tablets \[^7\] comprise a little under 10 percent of traditional tech reviews, they make up nearly 40 percent of tech YouTubers' review and unboxing content.\[^8\] And publications are hemmed into a single review per product in a way that YouTubers aren't, where one phone review can be succeeded by endless follow-ups, pitting the "OnePlus 8 vs. iPhone 11," or a video three months later assessing if the OnePlus 8 is still "worth it," and on and on.Product categories for videos were labeled with k-nearest neighbors based on labels from publication reviews. The algorithm was trained on the video's title, top portion of its text, description, and metadata tags. This analysis looked at 17 YouTube channels: Dave2D, Marques Brownlee, The Tech Chap, Snazzy Labs, Unbox Therapy, Mrwhosetheboss, randomfrankp, Jonathon Morrison, Floosy Carter, Hardware Canucks, iJustine, TrackinTech, Geekyranjit, iGyann, Mary Bautista, UrAvgConsumer, and Linus Tech Tips. Only videos that were marked as a review or unboxing video, either in the title, description, or video tags, were included. The telegenic qualities of mobile devices work with the platform in a way that other objects, like laptops, headphones, and GPUs, can't leverage. In turn, not only do mobile devices dominate the mindshare of YouTube tech channels, but manufacturers design products with even more fanatical attention to how the product will present in such videos, further cementing the device's target audience not as users, but as viewers. For example, companies have been explicit about the importance of the unpacking ritual. As Samsung [published](https://design.samsung.com/global/contents/wearable%5Fpackage/download/wearable%5Fpackage%5Fgl.pdf?ref=components.news) regarding their wearables packaging, "At times, the package of a product can induce a sensation that is as potent as, if not even stronger, than the sensation that comes from the product itself." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/youtube-brands.png) The centrality of Apple to tech publishers somehow pales to its role within the YouTube tech ecosystem. 13.2 percent of such videos are about Apple, compared to 3.6 percent of publisher reviews. OnePlus, despite having released only a handful of products in its entire history, is YouTube's third most covered brand at 6.1 percent, compared with less than one percent of publisher reviews, among whom it does not even rank in the top 50. The natural result is a further consolidation of which manufacturers dictating what technology even is. If the iPhone, iPad and MacBook are the collective North Star of technology, then everything else — headphones, TVs, smart home gadgetry, anything — is evaluated not based on its ability to perform a specific task, its longevity, or anything else. Instead, they are evaluated on their proximity to that star, their resemblance to it, whether they can speak its language. All the other objects become no longer objects in their own right, but mere accessories for smartphones. --- Before we dive into the consequences of all this, let's sum up where we've arrived so far: - Tech reviewers are broadly approving of the majority of products they evaluate. - Due to both financial interest (affiliate links and access to early release devices) and a general, personal lack of criticality, the tech review industry has become even more approving of these products over time. - Critical approval is reified in a sexualized critical paradigm that prizes endless novelty, spec maximization, and empty aesthetic sheen, regardless of whether or not these qualities come at the cost of usability. This paradigm was pioneered by Apple in the late 90s and has become only more lurid throughout the 2010s. - Through their scores, reviewers refract a paradigm of desire pioneered by Apple to both manufacturers and consumers, encouraging both to pursue the same design values. The company that has most tightly hewed to this code, OnePlus, has been rewarded with critical assessment on par with Apple itself. - This critical/design paradigm is even more concentrated on YouTube where the telegenic qualities of objects carry premium value and devices are able to be further fetishized through lighting and camera work. Accordingly, mobile devices have become the Alpha and Omega of technological consideration to YouTube creators and viewers, and the boundaries of who and what constitutes objects worthy of discussion has further narrowed. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/topolsky.jpg) **Tech journalist and Verge founder Joshua Topolsky shakes the hand of Matias Duarte, VP of Design at Google, during a* [**2014 "fireside chat."*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wipr1KRt%5Fg&ref=components.news) That all of this produces hell-on-earth landscapes of e-waste is such trodden ground that it hardly needs repeating. These images and admonitions have proven time again to not have much of an ability to sway most people, including and especially tech reviewers. Instead, as fucked up as the need to even do this is, let's focus on consequences that are more immediate and less abstract to people in developed nations. This waste itself is the result of a more fundamental consequence of the tech review paradigm: the creeping expansion of complexity, whose effects are borne in products' designs, manufacturing, and use. By centering the smartphone specifically and the Ive framework generally, objects that previously were untouched by the caprices of tech trends now must desperately accommodate them. This is the premise of the [Internet of Shit](https://twitter.com/internetofshit?ref=components.news), a popular parody Twitter account that mocks the creeping technologization of once-simple objects, which the tech press has benignly referred to as the "Internet of Things". The current landscape of consumer goods offers boundless examples; the Bose Frames Tempo is one of them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/bose-frames.jpg) **A still from a Verge* [**review*](https://www.theverge.com/22351451/bose-frames-tempo-audio-sunglasses-review-features?ref=components.news) *of Bose Frames.* The glasses belong to a new product class that combines sunglasses and Bluetooth speakers that transmit soundwaves by vibrating the sides of wearers' skulls. Their purpose is ambiguous (one can presumably wear sunglasses and headphones at the same time), and joining the two functionalities in a single object diminishes the usefulness of either: Bone-conducting speakers will necessarily have less fidelity than sound received by your ears, while the complexity of the object makes it difficult for Bose to offer a range of styles and qualities of the glasses themselves. That means the model on offer, which looks like the stock accessory of a QAnon car-selfie avatar, is of a limited range Bose can feasibly design. Unlike an identical looking pair of Oakleys, the Bose Frames Tempo will, over the short span of a couple years, lose their battery capacity and be rendered useless. The glasses received an 8/10 from [the *Verge*](https://www.theverge.com/22351451/bose-frames-tempo-audio-sunglasses-review-features?ref=components.news), who in the relativistic fashion of tech reviewers, deemed them to have the "Best sound quality of all Frames." Products like the Bose Frames Tempo also contribute to events like the ongoing chip shortage, which has inflated prices of consumer electronics and frustrated people looking for goods like the Playstation 5, which as of this writing is still out of stock in nearly every store worldwide. The complexification of products is accompanied by a complexification of their supply chains. The effect is cyclical: Placing chips in products makes all products with chips harder to acquire, and in making them more reliant on complex and fragile supply chains, delivery of needlessly complexified objects (like modern TVs, refrigerators and thermostats) to end users becomes ever more precarious. Ultimately, this means that objects which shouldn't need chips to function absorb them at the cost of those objects, like Playstations, that cannot be designed without them. Complexification has also birthed a new type of painful user experience. Perhaps the most pervasive instance of this is the emergence of Bluetooth everything, a technology that more than 20 years after its introduction has not been able to remedy basic problems with reliability and connectivity. Bluetooth's user hostility was recently illustrated in a video by the YouTuber Ethan Klein, who challenged his mother to connect her phone to a Bluetooth speaker before he could solve a maze of mythological scale, a match Klein handily won. This video shows a person unable to do something they want with an object. And while it provides an extreme example, no Bluetooth user exists who has not struggled with devices in a way that never occurred with wired 3.5mm adapters, a technology that Apple hunted down when it removed jacks from the iPhone 7 to force feed its users AirPods. Given the company's near hegemonic influence over how technology is designed, the removal was subsequently inherited by nearly every other manufacturer, and Apple's customers were forced into a new cumbersome choice: Adopt the company's proprietary AirPods (unserviceable and unable to retain 50 percent of their battery capacity after 18 months) for a smooth connection, use third-party Bluetooth devices (also largely unserviceable devices that lose their battery capacities) and incur the technology's agony, or maintain a wired connection with dongles that break every three months. No matter which path is taken, waste proliferates, previously robust devices are replaced with flimsy ones, and an object of compliance grows suddenly defiant. In a moment of disconnect between reviewers and their readers, this move was widely derided by customers while remaining mostly unpenalized by the intelligentsia. *CNET, PCMag,* and *TechRadar* all gave the iPhone 7 an 8/10, while *Trusted Reviews* gave it a 7/10, and the ever generous folks at *The Verge* scored it 9/10\. YouTubers dutifully unboxed and marveled at the phone. Customers seethed and then, without much of a choice, relented. --- In his book *What Technology Wants*, Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of *Wired*, coins the "technium" to denote "the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us….The technium extends beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts." Kelly sets out to describe the will of the technium, its teleology — what it wants. "In general, the long-term bias of technology is to increase the diversity of artifacts, methods, and techniques of creating choices," he writes. "Evolution aims to keep the game of possibilities going." Whether in fact technology follows this arc in the long term is beyond the scope of this report, and really beyond the scope of anyone, as is Kelly's distinct Bay Area-ism of ascribing a will to technology itself.This isn't to say Kelly is necessarily wrong in this depiction of technology. The less San Francisco version of this perspective is object-oriented ontology and the concept of hyperobjects that span time and space, like climate change and oil. While it's not unreasonable to conceive of human technology (not a given technology, but the totality of it) as a very large non-carbon-based form of life whose full conception is beyond the vantage of any individual in a point in time, it's also not unreasonable to push back against the notion, if for no other reason than that such a framing makes dominant technological developments seem more inevitable than they necessarily might be. But in the short term of at least the past 10 years, which produced tech monopolies, massively consolidated power and wealth, refined dark patterns in user experience, and progressively stripped away any sense of agency from anyone with less than $10 million, it is difficult to look at the mainstream tools constructed in such a context and appraise them as tinder boxes of human potential. As a counter example, it is worth looking to the not so distant past, when products were typically molded to fit the needs of users, rather than the other way round. The headphone jack of the original iPhone was slightly recessed, meaning an adapter was needed for audiophiles who wanted to use it with stereo headphones. That miscalculation was swiftly addressed in the space of a year, when Steve Jobs [unveiled](https://www.vox.com/2016/9/10/12871500/iphone-2007-headphone-jack?ref=components.news) a flush headphone jack on the iPhone 3G to uproarious applause. It was a simple tweak, but an important one, for the obvious reason that it expanded the iPhone's communicativeness with other products, making it more useful. There is one final, important counterpoint to the narrative of technological ascension and possibility expansion. This is the mean repairability of smartphones [as scored by iFixit](https://www.ifixit.com/smartphone-repairability?ref=components.news), the repair company based in San Luis Obispo, California. iFixit is a small outfit, and so there's a relatively small number of devices for each year, ranging from half a dozen to 20\. It's not a lot of data, but it doesn't matter — the diminishing repairability of consumer goods is now canonical among researchers. Products are less fixable both intentionally, via completely avoidable construction choices like glued batteries and proprietary screws, and because the tech review aesthetic demands a maximization of sleekness and thinness. All of this adds up to fetishized sheen, never mind the cost to the product’s longevity. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/repairability-scores.jpg) This is not a report about right-to-repair; for now, we can suspend any concern with the actual ability to repair products, shortened life cycles, toxic waste, and terraforming the planet so that it overflows with garbage. What matters is that *the potentiation of will is the only meaningful criterion against which tools can be evaluated*. And just as Bluetooth thwarted Klein's mother and the vanishing ports stifled teachers, the inability to open, repair, experiment with, and find new uses for an object is a contraction, not expansion, of choice and possibility that constitutes a brick wall blocking the operator's will. A truly user-focused review paradigm would map out the ways a user seeks to channel their will through an object and examine how that object potentiates or blocks that volition. This sounds simple and straightforward; reviewers would likely argue that they already do this. But if they did, the products they evaluate wouldn't be assessed as works of art on a relativistic score distribution, mostly good, many great. Instead, they'd be treated as tools that can either help or hinder the user, scored entirely according to where they fell on the continuum between useful and useless. To address this, there are two broad non-legislative remedies. Right-to-repair laws are winding or have wound their way through various American and European bodies, but even they aren't really as potent as they ought to be and mostly stop at requiring manufacturers to make parts available to repairers. The problems discussed here extend far beyond repairability. The first is to hold reviewers accountable for their credulousness in an attempt to push them in a more genuinely critical direction. This is not as futile as it might seem. In July 2021, Linus Tech Tips, one of the largest YouTube tech channels at nearly 14 million subscribers, published a raving review of the [Framework](https://frame.work/?ref=components.news) laptop, a completely modular computer that allows users to easily order and replace every single part of the machine, making it a more durable, flexible, user-focused design than most anything else on the market. Linus was so impressed by the computer that he pre-ordered one on the spot, and the traffic directed to Framework afterwards temporarily overwhelmed and crashed the company's website. Linus's review of Framework not only directly demonstrates publishers' and influencers' ability to drive demand, but that that demand is in fact malleable. As the scholar Rene Girard theorized, desire is not inherent, but follows the desires of others ― I want what you want, because you want it. It is not an exaggeration to estimate that a dozen videos expressing desire for products built on a set of values contrary to those of the current regime would be sufficient to recalibrate an entire system of industrial design. A second response is to embolden those critics who are already working in alternative paradigms. Louis Rossman, who runs a repair shop in New York, has built up a 1.6-million subscriber channel and has become one of Apple's most prominent critics, taking them to task for their increasingly user-hostile designs. His [impromptu comparison](https://www.youtube.com/embed/CkEV4sZQFzk?ref=components.news) of a Motorola phone and a Samsung, despite his self-deprecations, functions as an exemplar of anti-fetishistic tech criticism, interested solely in the day-to-day experience of use and whether the object conforms to the user's will. As an example of how a publishing endeavor might look, Mark Hurst, the founder of design consultancy Creative Good, maintains [Good Reports](https://goodreports.com/?ref=components.news), a thoughtfully compiled Wirecutter-esque set of lists of the best tools that function as viable alternatives to those of extractive tech companies. Hurst's recommendations can at times verge on Luddism — his recommended phone is the Light Phone, a black-and-white app-less device whose most powerful messaging tool is SMS, a product that can't be sincerely recommended to any member of society in 2021\. But despite its sometimes excessive contrarianism, Good Reports provides a working prototype for how an operation premised on a critical paradigm might look, and one can imagine it expanding given more resources. --- When Apple announced the iPhone 7 at its 2016 keynote event, Phil Schiller, then the company's marketing chief, offered the company's now legendary justification for removing the device’s headphone jack to preemptively deflect the inevitable blowback against a decision so transparently hostile to the phone's users. "Now some people have asked why we would remove the analog headphone jack from the iPhone," [said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS0txu%5FKzl8&t=4946s&ref=components.news) Schiller, who happens to be frequently quoted in Epic Games's lawsuit against Apple as one his employer's chief lock-in strategists. "I mean it's been with us a really long time. I'm sure you know that the source of this mini phono jack is over 100 years old, used to quickly exchange on switch boards. Well the reason to move on — I'm gonna give you three of them, but it really comes down to one word: courage. The courage to move on and do something new that betters all of us. And our team has tremendous courage." The self-heroizing spin was too much for even the tech publications to resist piling on in their blog posts (before they awarded the phone good to great marks), and it immediately became a symbol for the mixture of PR, market cannibalism, novelty obsession, and user manipulation that has come to define contemporary consumer technology. But building a product designed to be as useful as possible to the consumer even at the cost of superficial seduction, or refusing to endorse one that abuses its customer relationships at the risk of alienating the manufacturer — that *does* take courage. Hopefully its absence, amid a pervasive disenchantment with plutocracy, has finally hit bottom. This report was produced in collaboration with [New Design Congress](https://newdesigncongress.org/?ref=components.news).You can follow their founder on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/helveticade?ref=components.news) and sign up for their newsletter [here](https://ndc.substack.com/). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/mkbhd-federighi.jpg) ### The Chaos Bazaar URL: https://components.news/bandcamp-the-chaos-bazaar/ Last updated: 2025-10-30T15:33:16.000Z *Update 6/1/2023: A follow-up to this project focused on musical formats can be found* [*here*](https://components.news/tactility-and-experience/)*.* ## Summary This report argues that Bandcamp's basic business model of potentiating people's various impulses to pay for things and allowing those impulses to freely interact, modulate, and compound one another has turned the company into one of the most chimerical in Silicon Valley: a profitable startup run on mostly outmoded technology. It argues that this contrasts to Spotify,Due to its position in the streaming market, its outsized influence on other participants, and our interest in editorial brevity, Spotify is the only streaming service seriously examined vis à vis Bandcamp in this report. It's worth recognizing that differences do exist between Spotify, Amazon, Tidal, Apple, SoundCloud (especially), and so on. which routinely loses money due to that company's ultimate long-term ambition of monopolization and the removal of the human musician entirely. Finally, it argues that Bandcamp's marketing and software development efforts, while good intentioned or at least neutral, leave enormous potential untapped. ## Introduction When it launched in 2008, Bandcamp’s founders envisioned the site as a “publishing platform for musicians” that would do for recording artists what WordPress and Blogspot had done for writers: offer them the means of maintaining a reliable, fully customizable web presence. But in giving musicians the ability to upload songs and albums to their pages, Bandcamp’s engineers soon realized they had stumbled into an architecture for a grassroots online marketplace, one that represented an appealing alternative to the then-dominant iTunes Store. Rather than follow Apple’s lead and set a standardized price structure, Bandcamp looked instead to the example set by Radiohead the year before, when the choice to grant fans the ability to pay whatever they wanted to download *In Rainbows* turned the album into a global sensation. “Maybe your album’s 200 tracks and you spent ten years on it,” Ethan Diamond, one of Bandcamp’s founders, said in a recent interview. “But you should be able to set the price yourself because you know your audience better than we do, and if somebody wants to come along and pay more than you set as that minimum, then great.” Bandcamp publishes the sale of each item through a live feed on its homepage. We retrieved that data through the endpoint that powers this sales feed once per minute, since hitting the endpoint more often did not yield more results. We then joined that data with data from individual albums, which were retrieved separately. In total, roughly 6.7 million sales were logged, and a little more than 1.2 million albums were successfully retrieved. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/overview.png) Here's a brief overview of activity on the platform between the beginning of September and the end of December 2020\. Many of these numbers we'll break down in more detail as we go on, and we'll use a lot of the language in this graph and notation throughout, some of which might not be immediately clear, so let's break down two terms that might not be self-explanatory: The “average ratio” of price paid to price listed is an apples-to-apples currency comparison. For example, if an item costs 1000 Norwegian kroner and a buyer pays 3000 Norwegian kroner, the ratio is 3\. Across all of Bandcamp, people pay on average 1.24 times the price sellers list for their items. (The data from Bandcamp's sales feed includes both the amount paid in the seller's native currency as well as the amount paid in US dollars — which, as far as we know, follows PayPal's conversion rates. If an item is from Norway, the amount a buyer spent is listed in both kroner and dollars.) "$0 items" refers to items that have no price floor and are pure pay-what-you want (PWYW). Keep in mind that, even when purchasing “$0 items,” buyers typically still have to pay *something* to cover processing fees, and as far as we know, the price paid for these items will always be greater than 0. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/sales-per-day.png) Fridays are generally the site's biggest days, which is also when artists are more likely to release albums, although how much more likely is beyond the scope of this study. The numbers above 300,000 are Bandcamp Fridays (which we'll call BCF), occasions when the company waives the 15-percent cut it usually takes out of every transaction. Since the introduction of BCF, artists have begun aligning releases accordingly, and BCF is now not only the day when people buy the most, but when the most music is released. What about that non-BCF on November 13 with just over 100,000 sales? Well, on that day, Phoebe Bridgers released a cover of the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris", of which she sold 43,942 copies for a total of $178,735\. The track was available for a limited time, and the item page is no longer on Bandcamp. As it happens, Bridgers's sale of this track is oddly important, and we'll come back to it towards the end. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/item-types.png) First, "Bundle" refers to digital discographies, in which artists sell all or many of their albums for a discount. The ratios here include only items whose list prices were >$0. Bandcamp is now one of the largest sellers of physical music — vinyl, CDs, cassette tapes — anywhere in the world. Physical items account for 22.9 percent of all sales, but make up 49.1 percent of money spent. That outsize share mostly comes from physical albums, which alone constitute 36.7 percent of all money spent. Cost might modulate generosity to some extent, as people pay more for lower priced tracks than for digital albums. Although artists charge more for their bundles than merch and physical albums, people still elect to pay even more for them than those physical alternatives. Additionally, people aren't less generous when paying for the typically more expensive merch than they are for physical albums. Removing outliers changes the mean ratio for each product category, but it doesn't change this overall relationship. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/generosity-overview.png) Determining whether or not a buyer behaved generously — i.e., whether they paid more than they had to — is an ambiguous undertaking. A basic comparison of whether they paid anything above the minimum runs into a few questions. If someone rounds up a $3.99 item to $4, are they generous? What about if someone pays anything above $0 for a pure PWYW product? And since the buyer has to pay *something* to cover processing fees (which usually works out to around $0.40), how do you determine when they’re simply paying the barest minimum? For the purposes of this study, including this graph and all others in which we explore the term, "generosity" refers to any payment of at least 2 cents/pence/etc. above the item price. This ideally controls against people who are just rounding up the penny (or whatever pennies might be in the seller's country), and signals some sort of generous intent. Additionally, we only examine items that have price floors, since instituting a threshold would be a doomed enterprise, given the impossibility of setting a single standard that would make sense across every currency. The ratios here only apply to people who paid at least at the generosity threshold of >=2 cents/pence/etc. above the minimum. That means that, unlike the regular payment ratio in the first graph, the mean and median don't include sales for which the sales price and item price were the same. We use both metrics in other graphs and will indicate when each is being used. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/bcf-overview.png) In March 2020, the company launched the first Bandcamp Friday, an initiative to support artists by waiving the 15-percent cut it usually takes in sales. The event was so popularIn the course of this analysis, a few disparities arose between the company's claims and our results. For example, the Guardian published that on the first Bandcamp Friday, "fans bought 800,000 records on Bandcamp in 24 hours, totalling $4.3m of music and merchandise." This raw count is higher than any we have for the four Bandcamp Fridays captured. However, the respective sales figures are about the same — the last Bandcamp Friday we recorded logged about $4.7 million while only containing about half the number of sales. It's unclear why a partial disparity like this exists, but it's worth pointing out. that the company has continued holding them on the first Friday of every month since. Something interesting shows up when you look at the buyer behavior on BCF and normal days side-by-side. A little under 3 percent more people pay at or above the generosity threshold on BCF than on normal days, which is maybe significant, but maybe not.i.e., significance testing wasn't run on this. But while the magnitude of that generosity is the same for items with price floors, people spend much more on $0-priced items on BCF than they do on all other days. This might happen because of what behavioral economists have dubbed framing, in which buyers behave according to signals they're given. On BCF, the context of the purchase is a special day meant for supporting artists — a behavior typically thought of as altruistic. With $0-priced items, this signal might come through more clearly than with items that have prices, which act as their own competing signals. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/geography-overview.png) Geographically, Bandcamp is a largely American platform. A large plurality of its sales come from the United States, and a little more than 75 percent of all sales come from the top five countries, only one of which — Germany — is not predominantly English-speaking. At the same time, Bandcamp’s architecture has proven flexible enough to give the platform staggering reach: users gravitate to the site from just about everywhere on earth, with representation across regions, languages, and global income brackets. The precise extent to which activity on Bandcamp correlates with country population wasn't explored. At a glance, no obvious relationship between the two variables exists that would wholly explain the make-up of this list, which would imply the variance comes from elsewhere — per-capita income, the use of other means for listening and buying music, cultural predilections, and so on. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/generosity-by-country-pct-generous.png) This is how the generosity calculations break down for each of the top 50 countries. The mean and median here are measures of the ratio of generosity — i.e., for the people who did spend >= 2 cents/pence/etc. above the item price, the magnitude by which they did so.Mean and median ratios both exclude outliers of payment prices more than three standard deviations above the mean for each country. Nothing was controlled for in determining the percentage of generous buyers, including currency, per-capita income, etc. Were such controls included, the countries might shift around, or they might not. What is extremely unlikely, though, is a complete flattening of the differences captured by this metric, and the results at least point to geography as a variable in determining why people pay what they do. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/generosity-by-country-magnitude.png) Sorting by a different column only confirms the difficulty in finding clear patterns. There is seemingly no correlation between the rate and magnitudes of generosity for each country,The coefficient is 0.01. and even buyers in countries more likely to pay over the minimum don't necessarily pay more when they do pay over, and vice versa. Again, all that's concludable is geography's role as an additional complicating factor. Below, next to each country is a measure of how much buyers in that country pay artists in their own countries compared to how much they pay artists from other countries. To illustrate this, let's say you have a Nigerian artist and a Nigerian buyer. The artist prices their item at ₦800, and the buyer pays ₦1600\. The ratio is 2\. Now let's say that same buyer purchases an album priced at €1 from an artist in France, and they pay €1,50\. The ratio is 1.5\. If that buyer were the only buyer in Nigeria, and these were the only purchases they made, then Nigeria's ratio in this chart would be 2 / 1.5 = 1.33\. A ratio greater than 1 indicates that the country’s users are spending more on domestic purchases than they are on international ones, while a ratio lower than 1 would mean the opposite. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/domestic-generosity.png) On average, buyers are more generous to artists in their own countries. This is not specific to certain countries or regions, and it appears to have nothing to do with relative currency strength. It is true for every single country in the top 50 countries studied, and it is probably true for those beyond the top 50 as well. Fully elucidating the meaning of this graph requires volumes; in an earlier conception of this project, it was the report's main focus. But we're not even halfway done, so we're going to keep this part short: People are compelled to spend money on things with which they self-identify.Put another way, "People increase the degree to which they cooperate with strangers whom they perceive to be part of even very minimally-triggered solidarity groups. The most reasonable interpretation of this graph is that it captures multiple moments of shared self-identification: people who know each other,It's hard not to assume that this explains the particularly large ratio for the microstate of Luxembourg. people who feel affinity for a local geography, the shared culture more likely to emerge within a country, and even the likelihood that the experience of the artist results in music more likely to resonate with that of the listener. What's important is that the many synapses of identity and a sense of being fire in different ways, and a shared nationality casts a net wide enough to capture many of them at the same time — all of this in spite of Bandcamp being a platform that otherwise facilitates the globalization of music. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/most-least-supported-genres.png) For this chart, we analyzed only albums (not tracks) priced between $1 and $10,We measured the USD price according to Bandcamp's conversion. and only genre tags that occurred in at least 500 sales. We explored the challenge of analyzing Bandcamp's genre tags previously, as artists are free to attach whatever tags they like. Digging more deeply into what each of these genres actually refers to both affirms and complicates the hypothesis of connection and identity that emerged in the previous graph. For example, "[Brony](https://www.whatisabrony.com/?ref=components.news)", "BLM", and "LGBT"/"LGBTQ" are relatively clear instances of identity-centered tags. "Charity" and "Fundraiser" by themselve are not. It turns out many of these tags are in fact reflecting both types of affiliation. The genre tag "Alameda" is a reference to the city in the Bay Area. The only album in this dataset with the "Alameda" tag is Ska Against Racism, a compilation whose proceeds went to anti-racist organizations. Similarly, "System of a Down" refers to that band's release of a two-track EP to raise money for victims of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict.This album page is no longer available. The "Hard Rock" tag is disproportionately associated with that same EP, a co-occurrence similar to that of "Brony" and "Pony". Even "LGBT"/"LGBTQ" is not strictly identitarian, as one of its highest-selling, highest-ratio albums was associated with a charitable cause.This album page is also no longer available and the exact charity can't be recalled, so the association with a charity comes from memory (as well as the >9 ratio the particular album has). The high ratio of "Blaseball"/"Baseball," a pair of genres associated with the Seattle band The Garages, is primarily captured in an album whose proceeds went to a children's charity. --- Where does this leave us? What matters and what doesn't? The point is that it all matters. The item type matters and the locations of the parties on both sides of the transaction matter. The charitable nature of the sale matters, and the identity of the seller matters. It matters whether buyer and seller have met or whether they're strangers. Whether an item is priced at $0 or priced at $20, whether it's on a day when the artist is reaping the entire sale or just most of it — those matter too. Everything in the data matters, and most everything beyond the data also probably matters, from the way the item is described on its page to the number of tracks in an album to whether it's a limited edition to the album art. And once you've found everything you can measure directly from Bandcamp's data, you'll have to account for all the things that you can't. Was the buyer in love or suffering a manic episode when they made the purchase? Did they grow up with lots of music around? Do they live in a metropolitan area of more than 1 million people? Are they chronic nicotine users? We're halfway done with this report, and hopefully you read to the end. But if you don't, leave with this: Bandcamp has become an extremely rare type of company, a profitable startup, by doing nothing more than providing a threadbare platform for the chaotic variables of human experience to interact during economic transactions. This basic model is so effective that it works in spite of every other shortcoming the site suffers from. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/bandcamp-gross-revenue-cropped.png) That Bandcamp is in fact both profitable and a startup may come as a surprise to some. In 2010, Bandcamp received two Series A investments: one from the Menlo Park-based venture firm True Ventures, and one from the investor Brad Garlinghouse. True Ventures' successful exits include Peloton and Fitbit, which both went public, as well as Ring, which was acquired by Amazon. Garlinghouse has since 2017 been the CEO of Ripple, which as of the date of writing this is the seventh largest cryptocurrency by market cap, and in the 2017 boom saw its value surge by more than 3,600 percent. Doing a bit of napkin math, this is what we estimate the company's total revenue to have been last year, including BCF sales, and accounting for a few of the higher-level distinctions in payments based on item prices and so on. We did not take into account differences in item types beyond albums vs. tracks. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/bandcamp-net-revenue-cropped.png) And this is what we estimate the company made last year from its 15-percent fee. This number does not include BCF sales and similarly accounts for the differences in prices based on normal days vs. BCF, as well as item prices. Diamond, the Bandcamp CEO, has said his company has been profitable since 2012\. If we had no other information than this estimate alone, we'd believe him. $21 million is more than enough to cover the company's operating costs, including the salaries of its employees, the costs of its servers, and its rent on both its office and its physical record store in Oakland. ## Between value and valuation Sign up for our newsletter. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. But we have more than just this estimate. We know the company hasn't taken another investment since its 2010 Series A and the lights are still on. We know it hasn't been cannibalized by a private equity company who saw opportunity in a distressed asset. There's no reason to doubt Diamond's claim. With that in mind, let's look at one last graph. As unaware as people might be that Bandcamp is both profitable and a startup, they're also often unaware that Spotify is deeply unprofitable. For the most part, Spotify does nothing but lose money. Buying exclusive rights to podcasts and paying large record labels licensing fees while charging users no more than $9.99 (a monthly subscription fee the company may raise), [most of whom choose not to pay](https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/03/spotify-paid-subscribers-hit-155m/?ref=components.news), is expensive. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/spotify-operating-income.png) This is because Spotify's understanding of humans as economic actors is almost maximally reductive, antiquated, and fundamentally flawed. Its misconception begins with a straightforward musical misconception: given a listener's mood, Spotify should provide them with music to match that mood. This has been the explicit mission statement of CEO Daniel Ek [from the beginning](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/revenue-streams?ref=components.news), and it was the idea behind its "music for every mood" advertising campaign, which it ran until last year. If someone is going for a walk in the park in autumn, they should be provided with Autumn Walk music. If they've broken up with someone, they should be provided with Break Up music. If you've ever encountered a ridiculously named Spotify-curated playlist like [DayDreamer](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DXdbkmlag2h7b?ref=components.news), [Piano in the Background](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX7K31D69s4M1?ref=components.news), or [Cinematic Chillout](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWVFJtzvDHN4L?ref=components.news), you've glimpsed this ambition. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/ek-guitar-4.jpg) The end game here isn't hard to fathom: If autumn walks and day dreaming are best accompanied by certain music, and we can figure out what those sounds are, why have artists make them at all? The company has [intimated at this future so hard](https://www.fastcompany.com/40439000/why-did-spotify-hire-this-expert-in-music-making-ai?ref=components.news) as to almost issue a press release. Meanwhile, the company has pursued dominance through exclusive deals with star podcasters like Joe Rogan and the acquisition of companies like Gimlet Media, effectively buying up podcast market share in an attempt to monopolize the market and control the equivalent of the [Google Ads of audio advertising](https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/will-spotify-ruin-podcasting). In both regards, Spotify is pursuing the twin prongs of a standard Silicon Valley business model, in which a company burns investor cash until humans have been removed entirely (a la Uber with self-driving cars) and/or until there's almost nowhere else left for consumers to go to get what they previously purchased from a variety of sources (a la Amazon). Doing the first thing doesn't always pan out, as ridesharing companies have discovered. And doing the second both takes a long time and is only possible because of a weak antitrust apparatus in the US that has for decades allowed predatory pricing (i.e., pricing below cost to push out competitors) and no-questions-asked mergers and acquisitions — and that apparatus is rapidly course correcting. But Spotify's business is built on more than delusion and illegality — it's also a patently stupid model that disregards the past few decades of behavioral economics research and insists on seeing users as rational actors who simply seek the most goods for the lowest price. As Chris Golinski, whose PhD dissertation at UC-San Diego examined Bandcamp users, pointed out to us, Spotify's model ignores even the basic principle that 20 percent of buyers usually account for 80 percent of purchases. Instead, the value of each Spotify user is capped at a monthly subscription price.Put another way (one that may make some eyes roll, but whatever), Bandcamp is antifragile, since by leveraging the diversity of its users' behaviors, it captures multiple local optima of pricing rather than seeking a single global optimum. One of the funnier ironies of the startup world is how its members profess interest in concepts like antifragility while building companies on the most fragile possible models. The benefits/costs also cut both ways: As Andrew Wilkinson convincingly argued, even Joe Rogan probably could have made more money by turning down Spotify's deal and directly monetizing his listeners. By denying buyers the possibility of direct economic relationships with sellers, Spotify has no choice but to continue to pursue its delusional, illegal, stupid business model, which is less interested in finding ways for people to pay for music than in popularizing a mode of listening that people only begrudgingly pay for. So Bandcamp is profitable and Spotify is not. One is built on the creation of value, the other on speculative fervor. Bandcamp built a modern business model on what often feels like outmoded tech, while Spotify built an outmoded business model on modern tech. Why do investors pour money into one and not the other? Why are True Ventures and Garlinghouse, who, as the company's only listed investors, most likely sit on Bandcamp's board, not pushing for the company to modernize its architecture, aggressively market itself, and demand all manner of things venture investors do to effectively put a gun to CEOs' heads and tell them to grow or die? Here's a total conjecture that could be completely wrong, but is one possibility nonetheless: Ironically, it could be because of the company's very profitability. The idea of venture investment is that in a portfolio of ten companies, nine of them fail and one of them 100x's. Bandcamp has neither failed nor grown stratospherically. Instead, it has become a moderately profitable company without any expressed intent to take over the world. In doing so, it has become less like the hyper-growth stock Valley investors chase and more like a corporate bond or IBM stock in the 90's that reliably pays out dividends but won't make anyone as rich as Peloton or Ripple did. Further investment becomes a needless risk that jeopardizes a safe source of income. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/ek-guitar-3.jpg) f this is true, there are two developments that could unmoor this complacency. First, the bets investors make that a start-up might eventually 100x have at least *in part* depended on illegal activity in the markets that go unchallenged by regulators. Companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google grew to their current sizes by pursuing strategies that even politically moderate policy makers now recognize as criminal. As they assumed their sizes, they also bought up portfolio companies from venture firms, allowing investors to exit. Both of these exit paths — becoming a monopoly or being acquired by one — could shrink as regulators examine the possibility of breaking up tech giants, and as they more closely scrutinize acquisitions. Second, more than a decade after Bandcamp's 2008 founding, other investors, founders, and sellers have discovered that businesses that do facilitate economic relationships between sellers and customers — that let the countless variables interact as they will — are in fact cheaper to start and invest in and can become successful much more quickly. About 70 percent of Spotify's costs go to licensing fees with record companies. Patreon, OnlyFans, and Substack are stuck with no such costs, while also leveraging the varieties of economic experience, allowing people to fulfill the multitude of impulses they have to pay for things. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/ek-guitar-1.jpg) Just as we were wrapping up this report, Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey announced that Square would acquire Tidal, the long beleaguered Norweigian music streaming service — an announcement that was preceded by Twitter's bid to acquire newsletter platform Revue. "Square created ecosystems of tools for sellers & individuals, and we’ll do the same for artists," Dorsey said in his tweet thread on the Tidal acquisition. "We’ll work on entirely new listening experiences to bring fans closer together, simple integrations for merch sales, modern collaboration tools, and new complementary revenue streams." It's unclear precisely what Jack's enthusiasm for Tidal and Revue are. A worst case scenario probably involves NFTs. A less complicated and perhaps more likely scenario is that this is simply the new convention for creative platforms. Buyers want to directly pay creators for stuff, creators want to get paid. Barring world domination, it's more profitable to be a platform that allows that elemental transaction to happen than it is to refuse it. If these are the signals the market is in fact sending, it could mean that Bandcamp is no longer the corporate bond or the blue chip stock, but closer to the growth company True Ventures and Garlinghouse hoped it might be when they first invested a decade ago. With that in mind, here is a very incomplete list of things Bandcamp should do. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/developer.jpg) First, the company should extricate itself from a state of technological and branding inertia. Bandcamp, as much as it has endeared itself to artists and listeners (and, it should go without saying at this point, to us), the platform has felt like it calcified right after it was created. The site is slow. Elements of its layout are weirdly counterintuitive. You can't download music in the app, and the app allows only low-quality streaming.While the Bandcamp mobile app isn't terribly feature rich, the features it does offer work almost entirely without incident. The API offers no meaningful ways to integrate the platform with outside services. At the same time, beyond Bandcamp Daily — the site's in-house music publication — and a physical record store in downtown Oakland that most people will never encounter, the company seems to have no marketing, mostly resorting to artists themselves to market the platform for their own work. If we described the extent to which our research led us to people who *have not even heard of Bandcamp* (and somewhat harrowingly, this group includes decision makers at nontrivial record labels), the company's officers would feel rightfully perturbed. The company should also step into a more experimental mode of operation that a totally behaviorally oriented business model demands to fully work. If people spend more on artists with whom they share a city, see if directly promoting work in their cities induces more spending. If something pops up like Buy Music Club, a site that is an independently created way of sharing Bandcamp playlists and recommendations, acquire the site and integrate it into the app.This is not the same as an illegal acquisition in which a company either buys market share or competitors. This is, in fact, the type of thing legal acquisitions are meant for. Build out the API so that, for example, NTS Radio DJs can easily integrate the album/track pages into track lists. And so on. Second, the company should actively entice more large artists to release music on the platform to not only bring in more revenue, but also to normalize the platform beyond its niche position. Convince a few larger artists to release an EP not available on streaming platformsAgain, this is different from Spotify's exclusivity deals with Rogan et al. In that case, the company restricted what was a previously open file standard to one that was closed. In this hypothetical, the artist is still free to sell files, tapes, and so on wherever else they wish. Additionally, even if the artist exclusively released on Bandcamp, the strategy suggested here is that the company merely court artists to release on the platform, not bind them in contracts. and see what happens. Phoebe Bridgers, an artist who according to Spotify popularity scores is exactly on par with Charli XCX, brought in more than $178,000 from a single limited edition track released exclusively on Bandcamp that raised money for charity. What would happen if none of it went to charity? 10 percent of it? What if it were a full album instead of a track? Again, we don't know, but the sale of the track does begin to give lie to the claim that the fans of larger artists are passively absorbant of whatever sound the artist emits — that there is in fact a relationship there, and as such, there is an economics. And while the data on how popularity modulates willingness to pay is unclear, Golinski's research concluded that, at the very least, people who like more popular artists are not therefore less likely to use Bandcamp itself. However, it's worth recounting that the willingness of Radiohead fans to voluntarily pay the band was the company's foundational observation. Third, since all our fates are intertwined and things in the universe are connected and so on, Bandcamp should recognize that it can grow the most under certain market conditions that favor it. The conditions most beneficial to Bandcamp are those that favor value creation and that disfavor empty speculation and criminality. To that end, the company should consider meeting with other companies that stand to benefit from rigorous antitrust enforcement, like DuckDuckGo, Affinity, and a whole host of others, form a trade group, and hire some lobbyists. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/lobbyist.jpg) Right now, the only related group that exists is the [Coalition for App Fairness](https://appfairness.org/?ref=components.news), a trade group formed by Basecamp and Epic Games primarily interested in reducing Apple's 30-percent app store fees. Reducing these fees is, in the long run, probably important for Bandcamp to reach a certain level of growth: The entire reason that Bandcamp does not allow in-app purchases is so that it can preserve its revenue split with artists without having to also cut in a trillion-dollar company. As of this writing, the Coalition has already successfully gotten the Arizona House of Representatives to pass a bill that would force Apple and Google to allow alternative payment methods to circumvent their gatekeeping. Bandcamp should probably join, but it should go beyond this. One of the Coalition's members is Spotify, which has for years ironically accused Apple and Google of monopolistic behavior. This is the perhaps the only antitrust issue Spotify stands to gain from fixing. In this case, Spotify's and Bandcamp's interests are unusually aligned. But the types of market conditions that would benefit Bandcamp, DuckDuckGo, Affinity, and the others extend far beyond the confines of the app store and into the very bones of our economy. So far as we know, there is currently no trade group advocating in this area. Bandcamp should help start it. If it turns out one exists, it should join. But despite recent anti-monopoly efforts by US legislators — many of which will directly affect today’s music industry — Bandcamp’s best moves may be beyond North America. A recent report tabled by UCL London describes the broader crises within creative industries within the United Kingdom, describing a significant loss of agency and income for all emergent and established creative sectors. Alongside local economic policy, the report identifies monopolized tech platforms as a primary driver of this crisis. Bandcamp stands uniquely positioned against this form of antitrust, and its expertise could inform intellectual property reform, digital distribution legislation, pricing thresholds, ownership, and more as part of a larger strategic position. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/negotiation.jpg) Finally, if any of these suggestions are too much for the company's past investors to swallow (conjecturally/hypothetically/etc.), the founders and/or employees should see if there's a way to buy them out. Hopefully the opposite is true, and the investors actually understand that starting a new Spotify is not smart, that the political tides have changed, and that the odds of Bandcamp becoming the portfolio whale they hoped for in the beginning, by creating value instead of violating antitrust regulations, is greater now than it was ten years ago. --- We think there is enough information in this report for different readers to take away whatever they find valuable and ignore or dismiss what they don't, so long as they keep in mind the overarching points: That Bandcamp's model is antifragile and Spotify's is not, which is why Bandcamp is profitable and Spotify is not. We'll add one more non-negotiable takeaway, which is that Bandcamp is a company founded by people who respect music and Spotify is not. This is the ur-distinction between the two from which all others originate. Spotify will never deliver what its artists endlessly appeal for: Fair remuneration and good-faith avenues for artist development that don't involve payola or the equivalent of musical SEO. It will not do this because the existence of music beyond basic hormonal modulation does not interest it, and therefore, the existence of musicians does not interest it. The precise extent to which the same can be said of Apple Music (the second-largest streaming platform) or Amazon Music (the third) is debatable, but in most regards, they've made no marked gestures in the opposite direction. Perhaps all of this is overstating the existence of competition between the two ecosystems; in many ways, they can be seen as complementary, as streaming provides an avenue for music discovery and Bandcamp an avenue for economic relationships — Diamond once compared Spotify to the radio, a place to find new artists. Except that while Bandcamp may see streaming platforms as a complement, Amazon, Apple, and Spotify, which have spent the past decade devouring entire markets, rarely see themselves as complements to anything. In the course of this research, one of us suggested to someone at a record label that publishes its artists' music exclusively on streaming platforms that they should throw a few tracks on Bandcamp and see what happens. The person said they'd bring it up to others in the company "as an idea for any artists who want to pursue...the 'underground' look." Every recommendation made here is a facet of a single exhortation: that Bandcamp do everything it can so that no one sends an email like this ever again. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/ek-halo.jpg) **Acknowledgements** Special thanks to Cade Diehm (New Design Congress), Chris Golinski (HP), Ayelet Gneezy (UC-San Diego, Rady School of Management), Minah Jung (NYU, Stern School of Business), and Matt Stoller (American Economic Liberties Project) for their conversations and feedback throughout this project. ### The Map and the Category URL: https://components.news/map-and-category-bandcamp/ Last updated: 2026-01-29T21:23:57.000Z Music genres — whatever their worth, lack of worth, qualified usefulness, or total uselessness — originate from one of two places: from above or from below. For the most part, categorization is imposed at the end of the supply chain, where once upon a time, the sorting happened literally and physically as albums were binned behind plastic labels affixed with "Alternative" and "R&B" and the various crude metacategories that formed the vocabulary of Tower Records et al. Between those metacategories, the music press sometimes filled the gaps, the language of early Pitchfork betraying a certain coinage-frenzy. In the streaming era, the genres are called cluster 589 and cluster 1333, the results of machines calculating cosine similarities between thousands of variables that float alongside one another in high-dimensional vector space. These outputs are then squinted at by a Spotify employee who, examining the contents of cluster 1092, hears a bunch of Marathi and electronic drums and declares the nebula "Indian pop." Bandcamp, having embraced its ad hoc function as Not Spotify, imposes no such restrictions on the ability of artists to call their music whatever they want. And because the platform, to our knowledge, conducts no back-end acoustic analysis of the music, these genre tags (ignoring label pages and users who follow one another) comprise the most elemental way that one piece of music relates to another — the hands-off opposite of sending users down taste tunnels of its own machine-derived inferences, á la Discover Weekly. From a perspective of musical production, discovery, and culture, the results of this genre auteurship are somewhere between totally neutral to whatever a less cringe term for emancipatory would be. If you're here, on this page, on this website, we assume you already understand why this is and why algorithmic cultural determinism is a bad thing, and we don't want to waste your time by explaining it to you again. ## Between value and valuation Sign up for our newsletter Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. The map is an attempt to represent the difference in musical cultures from city to city based on the genre tags attached to artists' albums and individually sold tracks. And for the purposes of the project, the unruly nature of Bandcamp's genre tags makes things more ambiguous. As with nearly all Natural Language Processing work, data must be pre-processed and cleaned in order for it to take on any semblance of coherence. Pre-processing Bandcamp's genre tags, more than most work on other datasets that involve this step, requires an atypical level of discretion, as it threatens to once again usurp the agency of the artist by imposing order from above. In most cases, pre-processing these genre tags is relatively inconsequential. The stray period of "electronic." can be uncontroversially removed to form "electronic," "hiphop" can be corrected to "hip-hop," and so on. Further, words can be lower-cased without incident, various non-alphanumeric characters can be removed, and spaces can be added between characters in order to facilitate analysis without much loss of meaning. But what about "hip hop (real shit)"? Or "psychedelic trance," which linearly co-occurs with "psy trance," a more commonly used tag for what is basically the same type of music...or is it not the same type of music? Ideally, cleaning reduces redundancy and noise and allows the tags truly particular to cities (i.e., the genres that tend to appear in a given city more than they appear in other cities on average) to shine through. Take, for example, Tblisi, Georgia, whose most distinctly Tblisian genres include "depressive suicidal black metal." This genre exists in a cluster that also includes other notably Tblisian genres, like its abbreviation, "dsbm," as well as "depressive black metal", "suicidal black metal," and just "black metal." Are these actually distinct? Can one be suicidal and not depressed? If you're depressed and not suicidal does your black metal sound different? Is there meaning in using the abbreviation versus its full category? Because each of the genre tags is a product of the artists themselves, they can say as much about how artists view themselves and their music as they do about the music itself. The pre-processing is vital to the attempt to make sense of any data, including Bandcamp's genres, but in this case, it is tied to a pully whose other end is tethered to expressions that emerge in self-categorization. In addition to these more overtly musical considerations, geographic tags were removed from every city in which they appeared — "Richmond" was removed from Richmond, VA; "Berlin" from Berlin; and so on, as well as colloquialisms or variations like "philly" or "richmond va." Country names were also removed from countries in which they appeared ("Iceland" from Iceland, etc.), but country *adjectives* remained (e.g., "Icelandic"). Partly this was because "Icelandic" or "French" can refer to a supercategory of music, and partly it was because these country names were not perfunctorily included on every single page: every album in Philadelphia had "Philadelphia," but not every album in Japan had "Japanese." By this rubric, for example, "Germany" was allowed to stay in Mexico City, and "Brooklyn" could stay in New York. As with the formation of the genres themselves, the rules to clean up their naming conventions follow a mixture of logic and arbitrariness. The attempt to perfectly consolidate the tags is the same Borgesian folly that inspires attempts to categorize anything in the first place — music, reptiles, neurological states. And yet, as imperfect as any taxonomical system can be, when done with care and respect, it more likely yields something rather than nothing. The map is something because of the alert of recognition one experiences when looking at it, that the differences in genres particular to cities often *feel* meaningful rather than meaningless. Yes, "tango" is expectantly more particular to Buenos Aires than to Melbourne, Australia, where "garage" ranks among the most Melbournian genres. Likewise Seoul, where “K-pop” takes the exact place you'd think it does. The way the map correlates with one's own instincts inspires trust towards its less predictable revelations, like the prominence of "spoken word" in Raleigh or the supremacy of "podcasts" in Toronto. The way to circumvent this messiness would be to avoid Bandcamp altogether: Spotify makes its genre tags available through an API, and assuming the Bandcamp artists offer their music on both platforms, one could make a map with the same network visualizations using Spotify’s crisply normalized categories instead. Doing so would have allowed us to skip what ultimately amounted to months of sometimes grueling data cleaning that has never felt complete — in the final days of compiling the map, we discovered that the location-oriented genre tag "RVA" continued to linger in Richmond, eliciting a depleted "fuck it" from those involved. It's not perfect, because it can't be. But given most platforms' preoccupations with chasing holy grails of immaculate categorization, that's probably for the best. ### Every Story is an Epstein Story URL: https://components.news/every-story-is-an-epstein-story/ Last updated: 2025-10-01T18:26:10.000Z *Note, 9/21/2022: A* [*follow-up analysis*](https://components.news/what-content-did-pornhub-remove/) *of what types of content Pornhub purged from its platform following the* New York Times *exposé has been published.* *Stoya has been a pornographer for over a decade. Her first book,* Philosophy, Pussycats, & Porn*, was published last year. She is the co-founder of ZeroSpaces.com.* **Andrew Thompson**: PornHub has a view counter for every video, like YouTube. Every word in this graph occurs at least 1,000 times across PornHub. Take, for example, the word “hardcore”: A video with “hardcore” in the title would, on balance, be expected to get 38,000 more views than a video than one without the word. The word most correlated with higher view counts— **Stoya**: Is “step”. Followed by “sister”, “brother”, “stepmom”, “daughter”. And then “caught.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/08/step-year2-1024x708.png) **AT**: Which are all within this general theme. At the same time, there’s this growth curve of the existence of just the word “step” in titles over time. It hits an inflection point around 2015 and has exponentially grown since then. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/08/porn-regression.png) There are really two questions. One is why this began when it did, which is 2015, and why has it continued this runaway growth? And the second more fundamental question that I think I want to spend the most time talking about is, why does this type of porn exist at all? **S**: There was a performer named Kay Parker who was in a movie \[with an incest theme\] called *Taboo* during the golden era. And in 2013, 2014, 2015, I can’t remember, the XRCO Awards had Kay come present one of the awards. You have a lot of the people who make pornography in that room. So I wonder if partially, and only very partially, being reminded of the success of *Taboo* and how much of a classic it was reminded people of that theme. But I don’t think that is the whole bit by any stretch of the imagination. **AT**: I think of 2015 as being the year where analytics finished inserting itself into every nook of the internet. BuzzFeed peaked in 2015 off of this strategy of almost instantaneously responding to trends by creating content that rides a wave, however short lived, discernible from people’s activity online. My hunch is that this was when porn companies started to do what all the content companies were trying to do, which is getting really sophisticated about creating super responsive content. **S**: You do have this feedback loop that I believe is replicated in \[internet porn conglomerate and PornHub owner\] MindGeek’s world itself, where people who don’t value pornography, who don’t value the people who make it, go to the tube sites because they don’t think it has value, it should be free. So they go to the tube sites and they see the chaos of the front page, and some of them go, “Oh my God, this is too much for me,” and they wander off and they’re like, “Porn’s terrible.” And the rest go, “Oh yeah, fucking whore gets gang banged through the wall. Yeah, that’s my shit. I love that. Oh, what’s the stepson video? Yeah, stepsons. That’s hot. That’s really hot.” **AT**: You link the tube sites to this particular kind of user, but it feels like that user is the broadest base of porn user. Everyone I’ve told this to is instantly familiar with what I’m talking about with this incest trend. And they’re familiar with it because they go to the tube sites. **S**: I was in Southern California a couple of years ago speaking at a university, and a hand goes up and they’re like, “There’s no women in porn. We need women in power in porn.” And I’m like, “What do you mean? A director?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “You know Mason?” And they’re like, “Who?” Then I’m like, “Does anybody know Mason?” And no hands go up. And I’m like, “Okay, can anybody name a single porn director?” Nothing. No one can name a single porn director. I’m there speaking with them, they don’t even know that I direct. That’s how little people care about the creators of pornography. I’m not saying that these are inherently bad people, I’m saying these are people that inherently do not value the work or the workers in this specific context. And maybe they also don’t value the work of musicians or film makers. But it’s a person who’s in a headspace of dehumanization. To use a tube site is to be in an intellectual space that is disconnecting from the value of humans. You’re not thinking, “This is a fucked up power imbalance that could really wreck someone’s life.” I think the act of using a tube site is part of why they’re feeling okay about step incest. **AT**: Step incest also maybe feels like innuendo for real incest. I don’t know much about obscenity law, but I always got the feeling that you couldn’t even say that this is a real sister on the tube sites. You can’t say this girl is 16 even if she’s actually 19. **S**: I don’t know if that’s a legal thing or an obscenity squeamishness thing. Although I think it’s right to err on the side of caution on obscenity. Cards on the table, I think incest is wrong. I think it’s wrong if you’re a blood relation, I think it’s wrong if you’re only family by law, because of the power imbalance. You have just as much power over your stepson as you do over your son. And if we wanted to have a fun intellectual experiment about equal love between first cousins, we could, but that’s not what we’re here to do today. In the kinds of fake incest porn that we see happening, there’s a power dynamic. **AT**: The existence of a power dynamic in and of itself is not the element that bothers me in this. **S**: I’m not critiquing boss-secretary porn, I’m not critiquing some other power dynamic porn. I also find it very alarming that when the kink.com scenes show up on the tube sites, they’re not as connected to the pre- and post-scene interviews that telegraph the consent. When there’s a video on kink.com, there’s all this other stuff around it that’s like, “Here’s the performer talking about what they’ve negotiated and are about to do. Here are the performers talking about what they just did and how they felt about it.” And that context is really important. And so if these fake incests scenes were framed that way, if each scene started with, “Hey, this is a person I’m not related to. We’re going to play with the power dynamic of family as a sexual adventure, because it does this for me, it does that for me,” then I wouldn’t be worried about a 12-year-old seeing it. It would have a different feeling. But also if most of what kink.com was pumping out or most of what people were searching for on kink.com was rape, I’d also be like, “Whoa, what’s happening here? This is fucked.” I worry about a world where people aren’t thinking critically about things like incest. That’s what’s happening. People are going into tube sites, they’re not thinking critically about what they’re watching, and what they’re watching is fake incest. That seems very dangerous and combustible to me. I also have this chip on my shoulder about the tube sites in general. I’m like, They need to get some age verification going on. And if they have a good system, I want in on it for my own stuff. If someone comes up with a good age verification system, I want to implement it. We’re still, as a culture and a country, working on getting functional sex-ed. How old was I when I first saw porn online? **AT**: I must’ve been like 10. **S**: For me it was before I was 13\. I didn’t have a pubic hair yet. There were still images of people. And it was just like, “What are these people doing? They look like they’re having fun, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.” **AT**: The first porn I remember looking at was also the most fucked up porn you could have shown me. You’re dropped in the middle of the ocean, and whatever you see, you see. **S**: That, when combined with the lack of sex-ed, can be really harmful for people. It can take them years and years to unlearn false beliefs. People absorb these from romance movies just as much as they get them from pornography. But until we have good sex-ed—kids stumbling onto incest porn? No, this is a not okay situation. **AT**: I mean, to me, it seems like the fictionalization of it is so explicit that it loses all implausibility. **S**: People actually think Melody Star is my roommate. They think we were roommates at one point because we were roommates in a porno. You can’t overestimate the critical thinking ability that people engage in when they’re watching porn. It goes out the fucking window. It’s so weird. **AT**: That never even occurred to me. It’s so campy. **S**: Not to some people. **AT**: One of the major problems I have with it, actually, is its campiness **S**: Yeah, what’s your problem with incest porn? **AT**: My problem with it is that it’s totally deaestheticized. You’re taking, basically, as young a character as you can cast and putting them through the “step” door so that they are then plausibly 15 or 14 years old or whatever, and essentially packaging meat. There is no aesthetic to the fantasy. There’s just this positive value on the dimension of “step”. It’s a thoughtless product. It’s also worth repeating explicitly, this isn’t just a thing people like on the sites, it’s the thing they like *most* on the sites. **S**: By far. There’s a fixation. As a socially responsible pornographer, I’m like, All right, I have feelings, I worry about stuff. Now that I’ve heard from actual teenagers, saying “I’m learning about sex from porn online.” I carry that into my work. I don’t require barriers, but I use them whenever possible. Like the last scene we put up in Zero Spaces, we used a condom. As long as it’s possible to incorporate visibly safer sex tactics, I want to put those in there. For a reasonable adult, watch whatever you want to watch, as long as no kids are involved and no animals get hurt. Just do whatever you’re going to do. It’s the fact that it’s the most popular stuff that bothers me. And what’s popular rises to the front page. **AT**: That’s the feedback loop I think of. **S**: But also I think there’s been a sloppier feedback loop since the ’70s where only the people who want the envelope pushed in one direction or another feel moved to be vocal, so that’s the feedback the company hears. And then if the majority of that is like, “Oh, put them in pigtails,” then that’s what’s going to happen. And now, the feedback loop is much cleaner, it’s more direct, it’s efficient. It’s interesting, and goes back to what you were saying about the algorithms only really getting off to the races in the past few years. **AT**: I have yet to have stumbled upon a step video that felt like it was artfully executed in any way. And that, to me, is what defines porn on the tube sites—these decontextualized, denarrativized, deaestheticized pieces of content. Which might be fine. I don’t know if I need to spend a lot of time watching porn. I don’t know what my life would be like if I watched Tarkovsky-directed porn versus whatever video of two minutes. **S**: Oh man! I’ve already done what if Hunter S. Thompson directed porn, Tarkovsky might be my next. I don’t know much about his work. **AT**: Maybe I’d fall asleep in the middle of it. **S**: I’d have to do a lot of research. But that pacing really appeals to me. **AT**: I can tell you with certainty that my life is better with great music. I don’t know if my life would be better if I were watching great porn. And so on the one hand, I dismiss this step stuff because it’s so shitty, among a hundred other reasons that we can enumerate. On the other hand I do wonder, what is the consequence of tastelessness in porn? Because step porn is the height of tastelessness to me. **S**: It turns off people who want something different and then eventually they stumble over my work, Erika Lust’s, Ovidie’s work, Madison Young, Annie Sprinkle, Candida Royalle, whoever. I’m realizing there aren’t any women of color other than Shine Louise Houston that are coming to mind. I’m just marking that. But eventually they stumble over that and then they’re like, “Oh, what is this?” And then they fall into this world of Jennifer Lyon Bell and the the La Fille d’O lady, who mostly makes lingerie, but she made a porno, or Four Chambered Heart, and all the other creative, feminist, or artistic stuff. Part of the thing about it being interesting or multilayered or high production, whatever it is, is that it can’t be done in a factory model. I can’t churn out an *Around the World in 80 Ways* once a week for the next two years. It’s just not possible. Shine Louise Houston can’t churn out her features that investigate queer sexuality every month, either. **AT**: I guess there’s a more fundamental question that allows us to evaluate the step porn, which is, what is the point of porn to begin with? Why is it good? Why do we want to have it? **S**: It helps people have a decent orgasm, that clearly serves a very valuable function in a lot of people’s lives. Oh, here’s a contradiction. Depending on what you’re watching, it can be a great way to learn about sex. If you’re watching Shine Louise Houston’s product, you’re able to see a lot of dental dams in use, and get an idea of how to use one properly in a way that you can’t figure out from a book. In my capacity as an advice columnist, someone’s like, “My boyfriend has a really hard time coming from oral. What do I do?” Trying to explain that with words is more difficult than demonstrating it in a one-minute video. It can be useful for intellectually exploring. If you’re curious about something. This week’s advice column question for the chat was a guy who’s been married for 45 years, and in the past five or so, the sexual chemistry has petered out, and he’s also begun fantasizing about men. And because porn exists, he can watch some gay porn and imagine himself doing those things and take a little thought adventure before he goes and does it. **AT**: The uses you’ve described are largely educational. They almost serve the role that story does throughout civilization, which is a sequestered space in which you perform thought experiments, so you can interrogate consequences of different actions. Porn, in this particular conception, would be very similar in that you are able to sequester something and see its consequence before actually performing it. **S**: For me, the brain is the most important sexual organ. So that explains my biases and where this perspective of porn is coming from. Because I know mostly people just use it to get off, and go like, “I want to come, I need a little something extra to get me over the edge in an efficient manner because I got shit to do. I gotta get in the shower, shave my face and go meet my girlfriend,” or whatever. But also, rather than worry about what’s popular and what’s selling, I’ve made what I want to make and put it out there. And then every series you do, as time goes on, you take constructive criticism and shape it and it becomes more of a collaborative thing. But I’ve made my weird stuff and put it out there and attracted people who are like, “I didn’t jerk off to it, but it was really an interesting experience.” And so there are people who have a similar conception, it’s just, there’s only like a few hundred of them so far. **AT**: I guess within this question of, what is porn supposed to do or why is it good, if it’s established that it should exist in some way and that it serves some purpose, then there’s the further question of, what form should exist? What form of it serves this ideal purpose that we want it to serve? There’s the porn as you imagine it should be with Zero Spaces or even people you’ve mentioned. And there’s the tube sites, which predominate most people’s experience of it. Just like most people’s experience of music now has nothing to do with the purchase of an album. **S**: Most people treat porn like I treat music. I go on YouTube, if I really like something, then I’ll go, “Oh, who is this?” I might listen to something else they did. If I listen to it like 20 times in a few weeks, I’ll buy it. **AT**: So you’re aligned with this predominant method of listening to music now, which is on streaming sites. I use streaming sites. I buy albums sometimes too. There’s, to me, this idea of the role music should play in our lives, what a musical experience should be, and then how it’s been adapted to fit Spotify Mode. And Spotify Mode is this mode in which everything exists on these very cut and dried dimensions, in which a piece of music is happy or it’s sad or it’s danceable or it’s not danceable, or it has an acoustic sound or it doesn’t have an acoustic sound. And every piece of music within this mode is broken down into its component parts in order to more precisely target and influence broadly defined affective states. That is Spotify Mode. That has become most people’s experience of music now. **S**: And it’s the same thing with porn. They watch porn to achieve an effect, rather than buy the whole album, rather than watch the whole scene. They zero in on the two minutes and 30 seconds of action that works for them and move on to the next clip. **AT**: I see these tube sites and the step porn as existing in parallel with streaming services, between Spotify, between Netflix, where there’s this attention-deficient bouncing between pieces of content, this hyper fragmentary form of engagement, which is just postmodernism. Spotify or Netflix are designed to fulfill a very shallow engagement with music or film and television, and you can see certain content rise to the top of both of them because each of these modes has an optimum. In the case of Spotify, I think Drake has largely achieved his unfathomable success because he is the precise sweet spot within Spotify Mode, this endlessly listenable, mostly ignorable, affect-regulating muzak. To me, the exponential emergence of “step” is arguably the sign of a similar phenomenon, like step porn is the Drake of porn. Just the way that by existing in Spotify Mode for long enough you’ll find your way to a Drake-like playlist of some kind, by just being on PornHub, you will start watching step porn, because that mode’s optimum has a gravitational pull that sucks you in. **S**: My dude was like, “I watch step porn all the time. I just skip past the plot. What the fuck do I care?” And maybe they say something weird in the middle and you shrug it off. But then, clearly, there is a need for the plot because that’s what people are searching for. I want to know, what the hell are we collectively processing? There’s a book called *A Billion Wicked Thoughts* by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. They scraped the AOL search data that leaked like 10, 15 years ago, and I wish I could remember what the top 10 were and whether “step” was on it. I know “trans” was high as a search term. And it was of high sexual search within AOL users in the early 2000s. And then we have Laverne Cox and Janet Mock and Caitlyn Jenner. We have now all these trans people being accepted. And so I legitimately wonder, was there some processing happening that set us up for this? And then what the hell are we processing with this incest stuff? **AT**: If you think of media as the externalization of desire, then these are desires that we are externalizing and projecting onto a screen. If music now operates in Spotify Mode and the way we consume videos in YouTube/Netflix Mode, I think sexually we exist in Epstein Mode. And Epstein Mode is where you just transgress as much as possible and fuck as many young bodies as possible that are as young as possible. The reason the Epstein story is something I’ve started tying everything back to over the past month is because I think it reveals the libidinal dynamo of the system at large. So it makes sense to me that if a sizeable portion of our society’s stewards are associates of an underage sex trafficking ring, the fact that we all exist within their modality is not going to escape us. We’re not outside of it. That would inform sexual predilections at large. **S**: I, at 33, find how young I looked in porn at 19, 20, 21 unsettling. I have always held that the porn that gets made is a manifestation of the society it’s made in. Japanese porn, German porn, American porn, very different. Even San Francisco porn, different from LA porn, New York porn, different for both of them. And that’s only talking about the professional stuff. So I have always held that like, “Oh, anti-sex feminist, anti-porn feminist, you’re all spun up about this thing”, but it happens because it’s a reflection of what’s happening in the real world. And my concern with the tube sites and the kids is that we may now be dictating instead of reflecting. **AT**: Right, so let’s say media is an externalization of desire. At the very least, it’s an externalization to a receptivity to the introduction of something. There’s a symbiosis between them that I don’t think allows you to determine which is happening more or less than the other, whether what’s on PornHub, for example, is more a reflection of our tastes or a dictation of those tastes by the site’s managers. **S**: Which is why it’s a loop. I’m very concerned that so many people are so interested in fake incest. It worries me. And I can’t quite put my finger on why. I don’t think seeing incest porn is going to make people go out and assault their family members, but I do worry that seeing incest porn is going to make a kid feel like it’s normal and not speak up. **AT**: Someone recently sent me *SCUM Manifesto* by Valerie Solanas. In the introduction by Michelle Tea, she mentions how her stepfather, who was always the “cool” stepfather, the guy who would hang out and was the funny drunk or whatever, she learned at some point that he was drilling holes in her wall and spying on her. On top of that, someone else recently told me that their stepbrother would try to fuck them when they were younger. There was a four-year age disparity between them, he was 18 and she was 14\. And he would send her dick pics and try to fuck her. So this is a manifestation, arguably, not of just a taboo or idealized transgressive eroticism, but an actual, literal desire that people have. So the way that you described this guy who hit middle age and wants to start fucking men, how he gets to imagine that and play with that online—for him, that’s also an actual, literal desire. Perhaps one of the reasons incest porn is so un-fantastical in its imagining is because the matter-of-fact nature of the videos parallels the matter-of-fact nature of the desire itself. There is this immediate reality and this immediate desire that people have to actually fuck their stepsisters and stepdaughters. It’s important to remember that a lot of the step porn is a stepfather fucking his stepdaughter. That’s something that we’ve left out. So the question then becomes, is there something now about this time in which stepfathers want to fuck their stepdaughter? I don’t know, divorce rates are higher, people have more stepchildren and step-siblings than they used to? Is that a possibility we’re confronted with in a way we wouldn’t have been a hundred years ago? I’m just thinking. Mark Fisher wrote an essay about this *Vogue* fashion shoot in 2006 with these scenes of the National Guard or SWAT teams roughing up models in Gucci and Louis Vuitton. It was this violent eroticism that Fisher used as an example of what, in his eyes, porn could or should begin to look like. This step porn is not that, it’s not staged in the same phantasmagoria. It’s very literal. And so one of these things feels more … I don’t know. The step-porn maybe feels more achievable and real to viewers perhaps than the *Vogue* photos would? **S**: Well, first of all, very few people who like porn, like porn that looks like a fashion magazine. And I learned that the hard way with Graphic Depictions. But then I also learned that there are plenty of people who don’t think they like porn but like that stuff. It makes my skin crawl a little to focus on how much stepfather there is. Because that’s where the real power imbalance lies. It’s like how a prison guard can’t have consensual sex with an inmate. A parent can’t have consensual sex with someone who’s in their care. Society says, and I believe this, that consent is not possible in those conditions. Yeah, what’s being processed. And I want to know, is this an American thing? Is this a global thing? Is this men searching? Is this women searching? What’s the gender breakdown? There’s data from the Nordic countries, and I think there’s similar data points in the US, that the rate of sexual assault goes down when porn is more available. The more porn and the more different kinds of porn, the easier access to it, the lower the sexual assault rate. **AT**: I would have expected not necessarily the opposite, but I would have expected, at the very least, if you control for other factors, that there would be no change. **S**: So we’re the first generation of digital natives. We’re the first generation who encountered all the porn instead of just one magazine under dad’s nightstand. And in our generation, we’re having less sex, we’re having less unwanted pregnancies. And it’s the same with the teenagers now. We’re doing more of everything but penetration. There’s a lot of, “Oh, I made out with this person,” but we’re not procreating at the same rate. That’s pretty strange. I think someone would need to take all these data points and look at the cultural context and what else was happening. **AT**: I’m always interested in this current de-eroticized eroticism. I’m thinking of an Unsplash photo. You know Unsplash? They’re like the Squarespace of stock photos, basically. And so you get the faded filtered stock photos. There is, on the one hand, this hyper sexualization of nearly everything, in which it feels like rooms, signage, a couch, whatever, are engineered to subtly play on libido in one way or another. I think about this all the time living in New York, in which graphic design, exteriors and seemingly all matter here seem to possess a vaguely libidinal quality. It’s like the graphic, architectural, inanimate manifestation of Instagram models. At the same time, these very environments and these very artifacts are also incredibly antisceptic, they’re extremely sanitary. They exist within this super sterilized culture at large, in which everything is in frictionless Spotify Mode, where everything is smooth and clean and iOS-like and mess-less, which is what actual eroticism involves. So you have this sterilized eroticism that actually has a hard time finding fulfillment. Because in order to do that, it has to confront realities like mucus and semen and the filth of the human body. **S**: I hope someone goes and does the research with those correlations and figures out what’s happening. Because if it is porn, we need to know that. And if it’s something else that is important, we also need to know that. Because dropping sexual assault rates and teen pregnancy rates are really cool. And so whatever we can do to keep up that trend is good. **AT**: Although if the trend is being driven by the things that I described, I would hope that there was another way to drive that trend. Because that other stuff sucks. It sucks to live in. **S**: But you don’t have to live on PornHub. **AT**: No, but you do live in PornHub. That’s the thing, we all live in PornHub. We live in these various modalities that are PornHub-like or Spotify-like. **S**: The thing is patriarchy. Epstein is patriarchy. Preying on young women is patriarchy. Distancing the worker from the work is patriarchy. It’s all capitalism, patriarchy, all tied up together. I know everyone is tired of hearing the intersectional feminist shit, but it’s actually a thing. And Epstein, MindGeek, PornHub, patriarchy, capitalism, it’s all this Voltron of not being particularly kind to people, dehumanizing. For someone to abuse a child, they have to dehumanize the child. For someone to go to war, they have to dehumanize the enemy. And when people go on PornHub and can’t name a director, they’re dehumanizing the worker. PornHub makes it really easy to not pay attention to real people. ### Faucets of Despair URL: https://components.news/faucets-of-despair/ Last updated: 2025-09-01T23:12:52.000Z *A.S. Hamrah is currently film critic for the Baffler. His book,* The Earth Dies Streaming, *was published in 2018 by n+1 Books.* *This interview was conducted by Andrew Thompson and Kyle Paoletta on February 25, 2020, except for the italicized portion that follows, which was conducted one month later on April 1, 2020.* **Andrew Thompson:* When we sat down in February, the world was a few weeks away from being swallowed whole by the COVID-19 pandemic. It seems as though discussing anything unrelated to COVID is off-key now. So as a kind of preamble to the original interview, I have to ask how this has affected what you do as a critic?* **A.S. Hamrah:* Going to movie theaters is a big part of my life. The title of my book implies that I’m not particularly big on streaming, and right now everything has to be streamed because the movie theaters are closed. The whole thing reminds me of the Philip K. Dick novel where there’s all these miners on Mars sitting at home on streaming, pretending life is normal. However, this all has proven to me that people—at least, the kind of people I know and follow—want to see movies more than they want to see TV. They’re talking about what movies are the best movies to see in this situation. Here’s a list of isolation movies. Here’s a list of plague movies. I just watched Omega Man again and here are my thoughts on that. People have this hunger for movies that can supersede their lazy reliance on television.* **Thompson:* I looked at some data recently and when you ask people what they’re watching on Netflix it’s mostly TV. People watched The Office before and they watch The Office now. The same anesthetic tools people used in the past, they’re using now, just in higher dosages. You bring up a really good point about how it’s important to continue to engage in cultural criticism, though. Yesterday when I was doing the opposite of that I had this moment of clarity watching this bad show—* **Hamrah:* Wait, what was the show?* **Thompson:* Someone made me think of something that happened in an Entourage episode I’d seen and I ended up watching like the entire show. Which is the lowest of the low, but it made me realize I’m rather disinclined to fill this time with things that are meaningful. I almost want to fill them with the most meaningless thing possible because to fill them with something meaningful implies a future of some kind.* **Hamrah:* If you decide to watch Entourage over some other thing that is equally empty, you’re making a choice to experience despair in its most soul-destroying form, okay? And that is a choice that people should examine, but they don’t. If you choose to watch The Office, you’re also tacitly choosing despair. Because the whole point of The Office is: it’s cute how much we suck. Friends too. I’m not suggesting that these people have to have a Bergman marathon, but if you’re going to choose to do that with Friends, it’s just like sitting down and eating three pints of ice cream.* **Thompson:* Why is the despair of watching The Office or binge-watching Friends greater than binge-watching the cinematic equivalent of Friends for the same amount of hours?* **Hamrah:* First of all, cinema is better. The second thing is that there’s something in the nature of episodic TV that is itself a form of despair. It goes on and on, regardless of quality. There’s season two of Friends, there’s season three of Friends, there’s season four of Friends. A movie has an endpoint. It might have a sequel, but it has an endpoint. I’m not sure what an equivalent cinematic experience would be—the Fast and the Furious movies, maybe. But even if you watch a Fast and the Furious marathon, each of the movies is over two hours long. It requires more concentration and a more active form of watching.* **Thompson:* The part of me that is drawn to binge watching a completely worthless show is the same part that would abuse drugs, essentially. When you choose to abuse drugs, you’re choosing despair, too. Yesterday when I was watching Entourage, that’s what I did, I embraced despair.* **Hamrah:* Which makes sense with this crisis that we’re going through. I want to watch movies but I haven’t really been watching that many. I find myself watching Trump’s press conferences, even though it’s a terrible thing to do. I have a desire to be informed about the crisis because I think, like many people, being informed somehow protects me from it. Watching Donald Trump’s fucking nonsense variety hour is not helping, but I do it. It’s so bizarre, he’ll have special guest stars. It’s not just Dr. Fauci and Mike Pence and Dr. Birx, we’ve got the MyPillow guy, too! Since he was elected, the Trump show has taken over things so much that the pandemic almost feels like just an extension of that. The illogical culmination of it.* **Thompson:* I’m wondering how any image is not impotent right now.* **Hamrah:* Cinema answers that type of question. Television is a utility. It’s an appliance. And the stream is also a utility, like water. If you turn on the faucet, water comes out. It just happens. The images are not images in their own right anymore. Right now, as we speak, the most potent image is of dead bodies wrapped in white being taken out of the hospital and put on tractor-trailers parked in the streets of New York. It’s troubling, it’s disturbing, it’s tragic. It has all those elements. That being said, the more we’re exposed to that image, the more normal it becomes, the less that you see it. And that’s the issue. Keeping that image meaningful should be the job of journalism. But it’s not, because television journalism isn’t actually journalism. It’s just a form of entertainment. It’s a 24-hour entertainment stream. It’s their job, in fact, to normalize horrible, tragic things. What is a non-impotent image today? It’s the cinema. Movies can answer the question.* --- **Andrew Thompson:** There’s a note about the critic Manny Farber in your book, how he’s not interested in pronouncing movies good or bad. But he is still always for or against something. When we’re looking at the reviews collected on Rotten Tomatoes, it ends up being possible to tease out those two dichotomies. You can see the language that’s assigned to positive or negative valences and use it to parse what people are for or against. **A.S. Hamrah:** Of course, people think they can already do that with their favorite critics. Some people always read A.O. Scott or Richard Brody or Anthony Lane because they rely on their opinions or believe in their taste. And then there are critics that are very unpredictable, who don’t seem to have any kind of through-line in their criticism. Manohla Dargis is sort of like that to me. It’s a crapshoot, almost arbitrary-seeming. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/all-critics.png) **Thompson:** There’s an essay that Orwell wrote about Dickens, and one of the things he said is, “As a rule, an aesthetic preference is either something inexplicable, or something so corrupted by non-aesthetic motives as to make one wonder whether the whole of literary criticism in his case is not a huge network of humbug.” So I’m wondering, when you say that Manohla Dargis’ criticism is arbitrary—what exactly does that mean? And what is non-arbitrary criticism? **Hamrah:** In the case of the critics I just mentioned, who are from the *New Yorker* or the *New York Times*, they all have a clear aesthetic. A.O. Scott only likes things that are gentle. Things that are about families and marriages that fall apart. He likes domestic drama. He’s not interested in things that are extreme. Because, like the *Times* itself, everything has to be exactly in the middle. Offensive to no one but also serious in dealing with the human drama in a very humanist kind of way. Richard Brody at the *New Yorker*, he’s developed a film analysis that comes from André Bazin and *Cahiers du cinéma* in the ‘50s, which is very catholic. You judge everything in an individual way. Stories that seem trivial or generic are works of art. He also doesn’t like things that are too extreme, or too aesthetically perverse. He doesn’t like anything from the ‘80s—that was a cutoff point for him, the look or the clothes, which kind of coincides with the rise of the blockbuster. **Kyle Paoletta:** A lot of his work is literally revisiting stuff from the ‘60s and ‘70s as well. **Hamrah:** He’s obsessed with that period, especially in France. He’s a Godardian. And then you know, Anthony Lane, the *New Yorker*’s main critic—he’s British, he’s from Gen X and is more interested in whether films are entertaining and classy. He doesn’t necessarily understand them to be works of art. He comes from a generation in Britain that all thought Spielberg was going to save the cinema so they wouldn’t have to watch Mike Leigh movies all the time. **Paoletta:** Lane almost seems to be service-oriented. He wants a movie to do a specific thing: If it does it, he’s happy, and if it doesn’t, he’s not. **Hamrah:** He’s also considered a wit, even though he’s not funny. **Paoletta:** He’s unintentionally funny sometimes. Like in that weird, horny *Incredibles 2* review. **Hamrah:** And that’s because he doesn’t really care about movies very much. Dargis, I think, is closer to Lane in some ways. But I’m more of a casual reader of her than those other three, I just can’t figure her out. **Paoletta:** I feel like she’s smarter than Lane. More thoughtful. **Hamrah:** Well, she is. She’s smarter than all three of them. **Paoletta:** I like her the most out of that group, probably *because* of what you’re saying, that you never really know where she’s coming from. **Thompson:** What’s so interesting about A.O. Scott’s work, the words that are more correlated with positive reviews are things like “sweet,” “society,” “documentary,” “intelligence.” And the things he likes least are exactly what you mentioned: “comic,” “drug,” “chases,” “politics,” “dark,” “killer.” Whereas with Brody, the valances that come out are a bit more opaque. **Paoletta:** The words that correlate positively for him are “crucial,” “intimate,” “quiet”—things like that. “People,” “endure.” That feels very French to me. **Hamrah:** The values of a certain kind of criticism are what he applies to his own work. Humanism, but tempered by the realities of wartime, the realities of occupied France and of Existentialism. So those values favor films that are realist. It’s essentially conservative in a way. In other words, it’s not radical in its approach to how things look. The mise-en-scène is very identifiable and real. Everything happens in frame. It’s not explicitly political. **Paoletta:** One thing that really interested me about the Rotten Tomatoes data is how Roger Ebert has the most reviews of any film critic. Like, *far* beyond anyone else, in a way that suggests his criticism is very highly weighted on that website. **Hamrah:** Ebert’s very intelligent. He’s a good writer. But he’s essentially a Philistine who hates anything that goes beyond a certain level of formal innovation. He hated *Dead Man* by Jim Jarmusch. He hated *Taste of Cherry*, the Kiarostami film. I think he hated *Blue Velvet*. He hates anything that is pushing the medium to a new place. **Thompson:** The words used most in the reviews of movies Ebert ended up liking are things like “sadness.” “Dickens” is my favorite. “Poverty,” “heartbreaking,” “illness,” “touching.” Those all speak to a kind of sentimentality, which a movie like *Taste of Cherry* really lacks. **Hamrah:** *Taste of Cherry* is very anti-sentimental. The whole point of that film is that it refuses to indulge any sympathy for the character. And yet, it becomes moving despite that—unless you’re resistant to it. Ebert is essentially a popularizer. In the ‘60s, film became very intellectualized. A lot of literary figures at the time were interested in it. Ebert brought it back to the common man in some ways, especially because of the TV show with Gene Siskel. **Thompson:** It seems like the entire idea of a red tomato or a green tomato is an outgrowth of that show. **Hamrah:** It is. I grew up in a very rural area, so I couldn’t really go to a lot of movies. We watched Siskel and Ebert every week, but we also got the *New Yorker* in our house so I read Pauline Kael all the time, and there’s a very good public library in my town so I read a lot of film criticism there. The show didn’t mean that much to me because he was talking about a lot of films I couldn’t see, and I already had an oppositional position in terms of a lot of American commercial cinema. Every week they had to argue about if *Raiders of the Lost Ark* is great or not. And I was like, first of all, I can’t even get to a theater that shows this. Secondly, the films like that I’ve seen, I didn’t really like. **Thompson:** Is there something about what Ebert considers to be a good film that you depart from? **Hamrah:** His biggest problem with films he doesn’t like is that he thinks they’re boring. **Thompson:** Actually, one of the words that shows up most negative for him is “pointless.” Also: “contrived,” “sadistic,” “waste,” “dreary.” **Hamrah:** Right. And that’s one of the great questions in any kind of time-based art form. When that show was first on, there were a lot of films that were being made that were doing things with the idea of time and repetition. Chantal Akerman films, people doing a kind of post-Warhol thing. At the time, I was a teenager and watching a lot of Godard films, which are all about this kind of collage effect of not having an Aristotelian structure—three acts, a rising arc, and catharsis. They do something else that is inimical to the cinema. Ebert didn’t seem very interested in anything that was pushing the medium forward. He just wanted a film that told a story and did it well. By the early ‘80s there was a new kind of visual vocabulary that had come out of all the things that Ebert had ignored, punk rock and new wave and post-punk. They all had this look that people from the ‘70s and ‘60s didn’t understand. **Paoletta:** You’re saying that the aesthetics of filmmaking had changed. **Hamrah:** Yeah, and he couldn’t like anything that came out of that. **Thompson:** Do you feel like Ebert is fairly representative of the general public’s taste? **Hamrah:** I think he represents very closely the point of view of American Baby Boomer male film critics. He’s the pinnacle of that way of understanding things. **Thompson:** Something that’s maybe most decisive with Ebert, but true across most of these critics, is that the most negative term you see is the word “movie.” If he uses the word “movie,” he doesn’t like something. And if he calls it a “film,” he probably likes it. **Hamrah:** Pauline Kael writes about this issue. She only used the term “movie” because she didn’t want to imply a value judgment. So she refused to say “film” in that sense. I just alternate them, I don’t really care. But you know, for the generation slightly before Ebert, this was a big issue. Like a “film” was a Bergman film. A “movie” was like, *Singin’ in the Rain*. **Paoletta:** I would argue that Ebert’s criticism was about elevating what that generation understood as good movies to the status of *film*. **Hamrah:** Well, that’s what Pauline Kael’s move was. It was specifically a Kaelian goal. But it’s funny that for him it’s like, even though the films he was describing as films probably would have been movies to different generations…Did he ever review *Sátántangó*? It’s a Hungarian film from 1994 and seven hours long. Béla Tarr. It would be interesting to see what he said about a seven-hour black-and-white film about the expropriation of farmland and Hungary in the post-communist era. --- **Thompson:** To zoom out and consider Rotten Tomatoes in the aggregate, when you do this analysis of the whole universe of their critic reviews the term that was most associated with the red tomato was “T’Challa,” from Black Panther. Number two is “Wakanda.” As you go down there’s terms like “heartbreaking,” “restoration,” “mesmerizing.” And then on the negative side, one of the greatest sins you can commit is to be “unfunny” or “uninspired.” Then it’s, you know, “mediocre” and “slog” and such. When you just look at users, it’s similar. “Unfunny” is at the bottom. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/critics-users.png) **Hamrah:** I use that term myself. I enjoy that term, but it means something else for me. At my Q&A in Seattle the other day, someone asked me if I try to make the stuff that I write bleak. And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I try to make it as bleak as possible.” That is a conscious thing. I try to use a lot of terms that might show up on that list, but in the opposite way they’re sometimes used by other critics. **Paoletta:** What about the idea you write about in your book of never wanting to use phrases that can be extracted from your reviews by publicists? A lot of what comes up as the most positive on Rotten Tomatoes are words like “masterpiece.” I can only imagine calling something a masterpiece if that’s exactly what you’re hoping will happen. **Hamrah:** So that’s an interesting problem. In the post-Pauline Kael, post-Farber period—the period of the so-called Paulettes, people like David Denby—at that time, the idea that you would just say you liked something or disliked it was very looked down on. Just evaluating things in a thumbs up or thumbs down way was seen as poor film criticism and bad writing. I don’t mind saying something’s a masterpiece now because so many people would never do that. **Thompson:** I went to see *Parasite* in December, and as soon as the lights had come on this guy behind me said, “That was a masterpiece!” I was like, that’s a judgment you should sleep on. **Hamrah:** The best reaction I ever heard was this older couple in Brookline, Massachusetts. I went to see the movie *Traffic* with my friends. We were in line, and the previous show was coming out. And the first people who came out were a couple from Brookline, probably about 72 years old. And the guy looked at his wife in front of everyone in the line, and he says, “Well, just another day in the drug trade.” I saw the movie, and I was like—that guy totally nailed it. That was the exact right reaction to that. It was such a nothing film. I think as a film becomes more and more successful and more critically lauded, the more time that passes between when it came out and when someone sees it becomes meaningful in their reaction. They’re going to hate it because they heard too much good about it and then it didn’t live up to their expectations. Or they’re just going to say it’s great no matter what they really think. I think people are too reluctant to describe things as “great,” or even a “masterpiece” now, because everything has to be seen through the lens of ideology. Because you’re not a fascist, and you’re trying to show people that you’re not one. Nothing can really be a masterpiece under that regime of thinking. **Thompson:** And when you say people, you mean… **Hamrah:** I mean other critics and users too. Other people that watch movies and comment on them. Especially on Twitter. Twitter users are always fronting to some extent, while these users, or IMDb users, they’re baring their souls more. These are people who are just like, “I paid 15 bucks to see this movie. It sucked.” **Thompson:** I think ultimately Ebert’s criticism is the most salient to the largest group of moviegoers, it’s the perspective that most people walk into the theater with. **Hamrah:** Right? Because that’s premodern. It’s humanism, basic decency in both senses of the word. It’s a decent film, the characters are decent. It’s not, you know, *Bad Lieutenant*. The average person does not want to see a film about sick evil perverts whose activity is tacitly supported by the state. Tarantino is like that. He doesn’t care about anyone’s opinion. Ever. Most filmmakers are very concerned about their image and their reputation. If they can make another film. There’s very few people who don’t care about anything. **Paoletta:** Casting himself in roles where he uses the n-word, that schtick? **Hamrah:** Yeah. There’s certain Gen X filmmakers who have been successful in negotiating that line, more so in Europe than America. Like Lars von Trier. Richard Linklater is kind of like that in a way, but he’s more of a crowd pleaser. **Paoletta:** He’s more heartfelt. **Hamrah:** But his distance from Hollywood allowed some more freedom to experiment. These are all kind of post-Cassavetes filmmakers. They take the nihilistic version of ‘70s genre filmmaking and combine it with the more personal filmmaking of Cassavetes. But most filmmaking these days just comes from Spielberg and George Lucas. **Paoletta:** That’s definitely become the dominant mode. **Hamrah:** Most filmmakers aren’t going to do anything that’s in conflict with the heartwarming, family-centric, happy ending world of a Spielberg. Spielberg dominates. This is why the idea of influence is so useless. Because clearly Spielberg is the most influential filmmaker of other filmmakers. But all the things that he influences suck. **Paoletta:** His presence in *1917* felt very obvious. **Hamrah:** I hated that movie. The Spielberg aspect is, you know one of those guys is going to die, right? **Paoletta:** And the other one’s gonna stay alive. **Thompson:** So we’re kind of critiquing the use of the term “unfunny” as an example, which gets at the Consumer Reports sense of movies as a product for which you expect between 12 and 15 laughs and anything less you’ll be disappointed. **Paoletta:** And if it’s a tragedy, you expect at least one really good cry. **Thompson:** But that’s still just a version of thumbs up, thumbs down. It still feels like people want to know whether they should see something. There’s a finitude of time. **Hamrah:** They want an advocate. **Thompson:** Do you think that that has value? Do you think it is valuable to tell people yay or nay? **Hamrah:** I think by reading what I write, you should be able to make that decision on your own without me being explicit about it. And if people in my personal life ask me, should I see *1917*, I would say no. But I don’t think that function of criticism exists anymore. I think that’s a midcentury concept somehow. And I think people know too much about the movies before they get to the point where they’re reading a review of it, right? They’ve already kind of made the decision whether it’s something they would see or not. The point of writing is not to do that, but to be a writer. There’s so many ideas about criticism, but for me, the point is that we should literally criticize things. --- **Thompson:** Rotten Tomatoes has reviews for TV as well as film, and when we looked at the words most prevalent in those television reviews it’s basically all people’s names and show titles. “Costner” and “Broadchurch.” So there isn’t really a language around television the way there is around film. It’s all about the characters within the show or the people involved in the process of making it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/movies-tv.png) **Paoletta:** This reminds me of another point about your criticism you bring up in the book, that you avoid mentioning obvious biographical details. The example you use is Jennifer Aniston, that some reviewer felt it was necessary to say that she was in *Friends*. As if people wouldn’t recognize the name. **Thompson:** I think it’s notable that television writing is so obsessed with plot and the business of creating the show—that really comes through here. I do remember when we talked before you said that you hated television, that you think it’s sort of a base medium. **Hamrah:** With some exceptions. But mostly it’s essentially a form of celebrity worship. Nowadays, people worship the character sometimes more than the actors. **Paoletta:** Like McNulty on *The Wire*. **Hamrah:** Exactly. But you know, the thing that’s so galling about it is that people have forgotten what television is. TV is live events, like sports and award shows, the news and talk shows. That is the actual glue of television. **Paoletta:** It’s a way to capture something happening in the world. **Hamrah:** Something that’s happening live, or that just recently was live. All this other stuff is just figuring out how to fill up the schedule for advertisers. There can’t be a mass shooting 24 hours a day or the Super Bowl every day of the Grammys every day. So we have to fill the schedule. And people get tired of old movies. So we have to create something ourselves. The things that are good, they’re good in a way that the better they are, the more they are like a movie. *Twin Peaks* is good, because obviously it’s like a David Lynch movie. *Curb Your Enthusiasm*, to me, is good. *Deadwood* is good. Or *The Sopranos*. But most things aren’t like that. And because they’ve gotten so good at making TV cheaply, reality TV starts to take over, sitcoms become very codified. If you go back and look at a sitcom from the ‘50s—*Jack Benny* or something—it kind of has a cinematic quality. But if you look at *Friends*, it doesn’t. They got rid of that because they figured out how to do it in the studio with three cameras. It’s all part of the great Baudrillardian fatberg: politics, sports, and media all become one thing that just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. There’s no difference between sports, entertainment, politics, and media commentary. When one sees something that’s good on TV, it’s only because it’s so not like TV. If something on TV doesn’t completely suck, TV critics say it’s great. **Thompson:** The business of television is inseparable from the form itself, right? The plot determines whether people like the show, whether they like it determines whether it exists. **Hamrah:** That’s one of the main problems with TV: its episodic structure means that they will extend the life of the show past the point where it can possibly be good. Even a series like *Game of Thrones*, when they run out of books for it to be based on, it just becomes a freestyle. **Paoletta:** And then once they do end it, they’re like, “Don’t worry, we’re going to make a prequel!” **Hamrah:** It just goes on and on and on. When quality television started, places like AMC and HBO let people do whatever they wanted. The people who made *The Sopranos* and *Mad Men* and *Breaking Bad*, they were like, “I’m not going to fucking do this forever, it doesn’t matter if they think it’s successful.” There is a history of actual theory about television, you know, but it’s largely very negative. It’s all about how bad TV is for you. Marxist television theorists like Raymond Williams, he’s like the anti-Marshall McLuhan because he argues that television is neutral. It’s not hot or cold. It’s only what you make it to be. It needs to serve people in a certain way in order to be good. It needs to serve the community, it needs to be about *something*. It needs to admit that it’s political. McLuhan is still valuable in some ways. Even Daniel Boorstin, who wrote *The Image*, which is a great book, or Neil Postman. All those people are right, but the postmodern theory kind of eradicated the argument that TV was bad because *Buffy* studies started, you know, and once we had Buffy studies, it was kind of done. **Thompson:** I think of Baudrillard as being postmodern, and the postmodernism of *Buffy* studies is sort of a continuation of his work right? **Hamrah:** Right. But Baudrillard is hypercritical of the simulacrum and the hyperreal and all these things. He’s describing a dystopian situation, whereas the person doing *Buffy* studies is not describing a dystopian situation. **Paoletta:** That’s an outgrowth of fandom. It’s a way for someone to legitimize their fandom in a critical way. **Hamrah:** The other thing about that is how, because it’s all part of the fatberg, there’s this porousness between the writers and the people that make it. So, writers like Emily Nussbaum are constantly telling you how great TV is, and then they’re shouting out on Twitter, “Hey, great episode last night, Mindy, keep up the good work!” I would never fucking do that to an actor or director or screenwriter, or, you know, anybody. **Paoletta:** Another example of that porousness is the career of Andy Greenwald. He was the TV critic at Grantland, and now he’s a showrunner. It’s as if being a TV recapper is a form of auditioning for the role of showrunner, or maybe just to be in a writer’s room. It’s a way to prove you understand the structure, you understand the way a plot arcs across a season, and so on. **Hamrah:** In *All About Eve*, there’s a moment when Marilyn Monroe is failing in the theater and she asks George Sanders, “What about TV? Are there a lot of auditions? “He goes, “It’s all auditions, my dear.” --- **Paoletta:** When we talked before, I think you estimated like 40% of the grades that Rotten Tomatoes has given your reviews were off. **Hamrah:** I think it’s 20%. **Paoletta:** Either way, this idea of figuring out which words correlate to positive and negative reviews is inherently problematic. We’re sort of taking these ratings for what they’re worth; do you think Rotten Tomatoes is doing a similar analysis of the words in these reviews to reverse engineer the grades? **Hamrah:** Once they decide you should be “Tomatometer approved,” they assign one of their employees to you, and she has to read every one of your reviews and decide whether it’s good or bad. The thing that’s interesting about Rotten Tomatoes to me in the larger picture is, first of all, it’s owned by two studios, right? Secondly, all the studios hate critics. They really resent it when the critics don’t like their films. And they think it hurts them financially. So if I said that whatever big movie is coming out this weekend was a terrible, terrible film, people in Hollywood think that I’m basically taking money from them. But at the same time, they want to be able to advertise that their film is “100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.” They’re obsessed with that. **Paoletta:** I remember seeing an ad for a movie recently that showed the “certified fresh” logo along with all the blurbs from reviewers. **Hamrah:** The studios are fixated on the Rotten Tomatoes percentage, putting the red tomato on the poster, no matter what kind of movie it is. Like if *Sátántangó* came out now, probably the distributor would put that on the poster. There’s both this animosity toward critics and this obsession with Rotten Tomatoes ratings—it’s kind of a schizophrenic attitude. As I said in the introduction to my book, if the film fails, they blame the critics. But if the film succeeds, it succeeded in spite of the critics, no matter if every critic loved it. That attitude is becoming more pronounced over time. **Paoletta:** Earlier, you said that you would intentionally use words that other critics might assign a positive valence in a more negative way or vice versa. Is that part of their confusion about how to read your work? **Hamrah:** I don’t know. I’m not gonna ask them because then the Heisenberg principle would come into play. I had to write to them at one point because they had a review I wrote about *The Magnificent Ambersons* as rotten. I shouldn’t care, but I was compelled to correct that because I couldn’t deal with someone asking me, “What? You don’t like *The Magnificent Ambersons*?” But if it’s a new film that I like and they say I don’t like and vice versa, I don’t care. I don’t care if someone thinks I didn’t like *The Mule*. Or they think I loved *Aquaman*. But if it’s like a Godard film and they say I don’t like it then it starts to bother me. **Paoletta:** I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that there are all these weirdos out there who are going to Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb to decide whether to watch a movie or not. If they were looking up *The Magnificent Ambersons* and were persuaded to not watch it by a misjudgment of your criticism. **Hamrah:** Who knows? When Rotten Tomatoes approved me as a critic, they wrote me like, “Hey, guess what? Big day for you because now we’re going to rate your reviews, congratulations.” Then they say, “By the way, if we ever misrate one of your reviews, you can contact Sharon.” So they encourage you to correct them. And by correcting them, you’re actually teaching them how to read. ### The Center of the Center URL: https://components.news/https-www-components-news-the-center-of-the-center-think-tank-citations/ Last updated: 2025-11-22T07:09:22.000Z At a time when academics, politicians, and journalists are all equally suspect, think tanks have become the last redoubts of authority. Where else can a Fox News producer find a statistic that won’t be immediately dismissed by the Left, or a *Times* reporter track down an expert too unremarkable to be worth a doxxing from MAGA trolls? And the journalist’s cabinet is well stocked: there are 1,872 think tanks currently operating in the United States, a number that has doubled in the space of only three decades. Such rampant growth is hardly exclusive to America—at last count there were as many think tanks in Europe as on this side of the Atlantic, and the numbers in Asia are rapidly expanding. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/07/Think-tank-citations-by-publication-2016-2018-terminus-3.4.2.png) Only a few institutions in the United States command the monolithic recognizability of Pew or Brookings. For the lesser known organizations, proof of their reliability rests in a name that either suggests some hyper specific inquiry (The Urban Land Institute, The Migration Policy Institute, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy), or else connotes weighty meaninglessness (RAND, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Economic Policy Institute). Any Politico intern can tell you the Center for American Progress and Roosevelt Institute are the architects of Democratic orthodoxy, while the Cato and American Enterprise institutes have the ear of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Yet few and far between are the Washingtonians, let alone lay citizens, who have any clear idea of the process through which policy actually emerges from any of them. All that is known is that there are people…thinking. If one institution has become synonymous with the conservative side of the ledger, it is the Heritage Foundation. In 2015, James Carafano, one of the group’s vice presidents, [defended](%5C%22https://nationalinterest.org/feature/think-tanks-arent-going-extinct-they-have-evolve-14137%5C%22) the continuing dominance of centers like his over the terms under which America’s political battles are waged. His argument begins from the hackneyed premise that think tanks are contemporary embodiments of the Euro-style salons that spread throughout the young republic in the 19th Century, representing a “gathering of bodies as well as minds, where thinkers could converse face to face, exchanging information, offering ideas, and advancing theories.” Sumptuous as that sounds, few, if any, think tanks were expressly founded for dignitaries to have a place where they could sit in armchairs and sniff brandy. Robert Brookings’s motivation for launching the institution that would eventually take his name was very clear: he wanted to address what he considered the nation’s lack of an ability to effectively mobilize for battle, a deficit he confronted while serving on President Wilson’s War Industries Board and Price Fixing Committee during World War I. While not every think tank’s origins are so transparently tied to the project of American hegemony, it’s surely no accident that none existed until the United States had arrived on the world scene as a so-called great power. How else to understand the logarithmic rise of think tanks with the onset of the Cold War other than as a manifestation of the need to stoke the ideological furnace of American dominance? Though America’s primacy is undeniably waning, Carafano, in keeping with Heritage’s reputation as a staunch defender of plutocracy (founded by the Coors and Mellon families in the 1970s, Heritage is now a prime beneficiary of Koch money), opens his coat like a back-alley watch salesman to reveal a full array of anodyne, market-friendly bits of jargon to make the case for why “the think tank community” has any continuing utility. Think tanks, he writes, offer a “collaborative, interdisciplinary environment” capable of “turning human capital into a competitive advantage.” Such language underscores Heritage’s commitment to…well, nothing. This is a body whose governing ideology, if it has one, is corporatist expediency. Which, it turns out, is a pretty good sobriquet for Trumpism. A [recent Heritage “commentary”](https://www.heritage.org/markets-and-finance/commentary/its-middle-class-boom?ref=components.news) called our current age of catastrophic wealth inequality “a Middle Class Boom”; [another](https://www.heritage.org/defense/commentary/afghanistan-much-more-important-us-syria-afghans-need-american-troops?ref=components.news), from Carafano himself, excused the President’s incoherent decision to allow Turkey to invade northern Syria by arguing the war-torn country had “always been peripheral to American interests.” Heritage’s lapdog creed is so obvious and overwhelming that it’s tempting to simply dismiss their work the way any thinking person ignores Breitbart or Fox News. Yet it is the fourth most cited think tank by Politico, a dutifully non-partisan site. And Heritage is far from the only conservative organization to receive featured billing there: the American Enterprise Institute—who we can thank for inventing neoconservatism and whispering justifications for the Iraq War into George Bush’s ear—has been cited by Politico writers more than any other think tank since 2016. Politico’s preference for Heritage and AEI over their liberal equivalents is hardly some covert attempt by its journalists to feed conservative talking points to their readers. Rather, it evinces how skilled conservative think tankers are at playing the Washington game. Politico, like the cable news networks, survives by offering politics as a 24/7 lifestyle, a hobby that can be pursued from the office, over drinks, or while sitting on the toilet. Having one’s free time consumed by congressional jockeying would be bizarre anywhere else in the country, but it is second nature inside the Beltway, and Heritage and AEI have apparently done a bang-up job of ingratiating themselves into the toxic culture of schmoozing that thrives there. The “researchers” from those think tanks are the ones who Politico’s reporters are seeing out and about—it can’t be surprising that those same reporters, when it comes time to cite a stat or forage for a quote, reach for one of the business cards already tucked in their pocketbooks. Elsewhere, you’ll find an unfamiliar name that has become bizarrely pervasive across the media spectrum, receiving top billing from both senescent D.C. marms and youthful new-media provocateurs: the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Founded in 1962 by a decorated admiral and an author who would go on to serve as Reagan’s ambassador to NATO, the CSIS describes itself as “one of the world’s preeminent international policy institutions focused on defense and security; regional study; and transnational challenges ranging from energy and trade to global development and economic integration.” It’s a sufficiently vague ambit to allow work on all things geopolitical, including a [podcast](https://www.csis.org/podcasts/take-directed?ref=components.news) on Ebola in the Congo and infographics about the [Arctic](https://ocean.csis.org/spotlights/charting-a-new-arctic-ocean/?ref=components.news). Yet, the organization’s specialization has always been defense, and an enduring Cold Warrior mentality is not hard to detect in its publications, to say nothing of its very name. Earlier this fall, CSIS released a [book](https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442281134/Ironclad-Forging-a-New-Future-for-America%27s-Alliance?ref=components.news) titled *Ironclad: Forging a New Future for America’s Alliances*, and in October, one of its researchers [warned](https://www.csis.org/analysis/more-missiles-china-previews-its-new-way-war?ref=components.news) that a military parade in China “revealed a nation seeking to supplant the United States as the dominant military and technological power in the Asia-Pacific.” CSIS’s “non-partisan” designation essentially means that its ideology lines up cleanly with the internationalist foreign policy Robert Brookings favored and which has held sway in the US since the end of World War II, regardless of which party controls Washington. And with a name that assures the news media that its research is both strategic *and* international, most outlets pass the surely authoritative work being done there along to their readers without pausing for even a second to examine the group’s motivations. However vociferous CSIS’s arguments for the status quo, its voice and influence are easily drowned out by Brookings. Over the past hundred years, the institution’s mandate [has expanded](https://www.brookings.edu/about-us/brookings-institution-history/robert-somers-brookings/?ref=components.news) from fulfilling “the need for improved economic research and a trained corps of civil servants” originally identified by its namesake into zeal for business interests writ large. There are a few million good reasons for that: as the *Times* [reported](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/us/politics/think-tanks-research-and-corporate-lobbying.html?ref=components.news) in 2016, Brookings’s unquenchable thirst for corporate dollars has translated into publishing “research” that lines up with its donors’ priorities, helping it to land eye-popping donations, including one from JP Morgan Chase for $15 million. As Senator Elizabeth Warren put it to the *Times*, such donations allow corporations to buy “the glossy name of independence” associated with a think tank like Brookings without having to meet the rigorous disclosures that traditional lobbying requires. Despite its own reporting, the *Times* has continued to reference Brookings at a rapid clip. And readers are rarely, if ever, given proper context for the information being attributed to it or any other think tank. In a 2010 study of NPR’s references to think tanks, that outlet’s [public editor](https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2011/04/12/134229266/what-to-think-about-think-tanks?ref=components.news) found that AEI, the Center for American Progress, and Heritage were all routinely referred to by the network without any accompanying discussion of their political leanings, let alone their methodologies. If an outlet as avowedly neutral as NPR fails to mention that AEI is conservative, what are the chances that it can be trusted to provide some even more finely grained context for the biases of CSIS or Brookings? Even setting aside ideology, how often are journalists providing any information about the source of these institutions’ funding, or the background of their researchers? How many readers could, based solely on the information offered to them in the news, cite a meaningful distinction between the Middle East Institute and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy? The Council on Foreign Relations and the European Council on Foreign Relations? Journalists nevertheless continue to lean on these bodies, their very status as think tanks serving to prop up the reliability of whatever information is harvested from them. Such blind reliance speaks not to any political bias, but rather an institutional one, a defaulting back to entrenched systems. Practitioners call this sort of thinking “centrism”, a term that invokes their fantasies about its universality. In contrast, research that originates at universities is thought to lean left, even if it, too, is haunted by the specter of special interests. However suspect, the work of academics is, at the very least, peer reviewed, while the studies, papers, and briefings churned out by think tanks are subject to no outside scrutiny whatsoever. Brookings and Pew fear no public accountability. Their findings may as well be written on stone tablets, so rarely are they critiqued or questioned in the press. This suggests a subtle but systemic inclination toward the perpetuation of a state of affairs that has reigned since the middle of the last century, one that favors an established order built by and for the wealthy, white, and male. If that seems extreme, just take a look at the regularity with which these think tanks are referenced. In the span of three years, the *Times*’s 20 favorite think tanks were cited more than 2,300 times—a rate of over twice a day. Politico referred to its own preferred groups around once a day, and even the young punks at Vice appealed to theirs a few times a week. The result is little beyond authoritative empty calories: statistics that will be forgotten as soon as the reader is on to the next line, an expert quote that serves only to demonstrate the writer spoke to an expert—if said expert also enjoys the margaritas at the Tortilla Coast in Capitol Hill, so much the better. Though the content of that expertise hardly lasts in a reader’s mind, what does is the impression of competence, a sense that deep in the bowels of some federal-style building in Foggy Bottom, a lot of very important people are sitting at desks, working out the solutions to the problems that ail the nation. That their solutions are more often than not geared to do nothing beyond prop up the systems that have created those problems in the first place falls by the wayside, extraneous context that would only confuse the issue. ### It Goes On URL: https://components.news/it-goes-on-album-length/ Last updated: 2025-11-22T07:09:55.000Z In Spotify’s world, the narratives of music are defined by false equivalencies, as streaming services scramble to assert their own value. Music streaming services declare that they’re saving the industry (!) due to the fact that *total music industry profits* have risen in the streaming era, the first music industry increases in years. But more gross revenue does not equate to an industry where the vast majority of artists are able to make a living. They claim to be “leveling the playing field” for artists to access fans. But just because these tools are literally accessible to the majority of artists does not mean that all artists have a fair shot at making these tools work for them—as we learned a couple of years ago, 99% of the streams on Spotify go to only 10% of artists on the platform. And just because someone is literally listening to *a greater number of artists* via their Discover Weekly playlists doesn’t mean they are processing or retaining any names of artists included therein, undermining the suggestion that algorithmic playlists lead to more adventurous discovery. In a changing industry, the numbers can be deceptive. Somewhere between Drake’s 2016 really-long-player *Views* and last year’s one-hour-and-forty-six minute Migos record *Culture II,* another narrative emerged, as nearly every major music outlet rushed to read into the expanding length of albums. *AV Club* dubs ours “the era of the way-too-long album,” while *The Guardian* wonders if musicians are “spreading themselves too thinly.” *Pitchfork* wants to know, “Are Rap Albums Really Getting Longer?” *Fact* put it more directly in 2016, declaring that “albums are getting unbearably long…and bullshit new streaming rules are to blame.” But is this an actual phenomenon, or a trend over-inflated by a few high-profile outliers? Are albums lengths *generally* increasing, or is it that a small number of extremely visible super-long albums, with the backing of the major-label machine, are giving us the impression of such? Is it just a myth perpetuated by Drake albums? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/album_length_graphs_bw_3.png) Yes and no; maybe both. It’s unclear whether any one change is part of a drastic trend, a subtle shift, or a blip entirely. The longest number-one albums between 2011 and 2018 all fall within the last of the two years, but the extent to which the aggregate has followed suit depends on granular technicalities: Count an album every time it appeared in the Billboard 200, no matter how many times it charted, and album length is climbing with the steepness of a mortgage-bubble. Remove duplicate albums and what’s left is maybe a brief aberration in an otherwise sinusoidal flow. In reality, the ultra-long album is one of many trends major-labels are betting on in the streaming era, but it’s one that has become popular among a handful of big-name artists. There are still plenty of pop albums reaching success on the charts without 20+ tracks; the “era of the way-too-long album” is hardly absolute. But even so, the decisions of, say, the Ed Sheerans of the world (whose 16-track album *÷* is frequently cited in these conversations) have outsized consequences for culture. While their ultra-long albums shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a sure sign of the future, they also shouldn’t be ignored. Another one of the music press’s takes on the phenomenon of the ultra-long album is that this a way artists are “gaming” the streaming services to serve their own bottom lines and scrape together more fractions of cents—particularly since 2014, the year that Billboard charts began to incorporate a metric known as the *album-equivalent unit,* wherein one album sale equals 10 songs downloads (like through the iTunes store) and also equals 1500 streams. But as with other exploitative digital tools that create more value for themselves than anyone else, we need to ask: are artists gaming the system, or is the system gaming artists? The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, with as much blame to be placed on the services as on disoriented major-label execs who are likely encouraging albums of a certain length (or maybe even contractually requiring it) as they observe the successes of artists like Drake and Ed Sheeran, who have both ended up as the most-streamed artists on Spotify at year-end time every year since the dawn of the album-equivalent unit: Sheeran in 2014, Drake in 2015, Drake again in 2016, Sheeran again in 2017, Drake again in 2018\. There is certainly a connection between their absurdly long track lists. There’s nothing inherently wrong with an extremely long album, and pushing back against it entirely might be just as arbitrary—who can really say what length will serve what artist?—but it’s hard to ignore the way it fits into a bigger shift of music discovery and listening trends towards playlists meant to be left in the background, an environment where connections with playlists and curators are favored over connections with songs or albums. What does it mean for artists to use their albums to contribute to those shifting dynamics? In a sense it all just feels like part of the grand shift from album-listening to playlist-listening (perhaps most clearly seen when Drake actually released *More Life* as a playlist rather than an album), but where artists are more or less using their own albums to contribute to the obsolescence of albums. ### Scored and Arranged URL: https://components.news/scored-and-arranged-pitchfork-reviews/ Last updated: 2025-10-04T18:55:18.000Z *Nick James Scavo is a musician and writer based in New York City. He works in various solo and collaborative projects with The Actual School, contributes regular reviews and essays to Tiny Mix Tapes, and has presented work with MoMA PS1, Artists Space, The New Museum, Rhizome, Control Synthesizers and Electronic Devices, and in residence at NTS Radio. He is Communications Director and Assistant Curator at ISSUE Project Room.* *Throughout this interview, the term “bell curve” is used loosely to refer to any unimodal distribution in which values around the median indicate middle-range scores of evaluation, rather than to refer to a symmetrical distribution.* **Andrew Thompson**: I think the place to start is just the graph of the distribution of Pitchfork’s scores overall to look at how Pitchfork tends to rate things, as a way to consider the idea of the Pitchfork rating and this system of evaluation. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/08/pitchfork-scores.png) So this is a histogram of how their scores are distributed. The average Pitchfork score is almost exactly 7, the median is 7.3\. From your perspective, what is the Pitchfork rating system? What is its intent and its effect? **Nick Scavo**: When you look at a model like this I can’t help but think of being graded on a bell curve. So there’s obviously an assumed educational power dynamic existing from the expert or the professor to the critic in assigning an actual grade to the performance in some way. I feel in the history of criticism, you don’t normally have an actual numerical value. For the most part, in the history of 20th Century Art, you have some kind of intellectual engagement. But with Pitchfork and publications like it at the beginning of the 21st Century, critics mirrored the content they were addressing by operating within industrialized conditions—they started assigning numerical value to aesthetic work. I think this might be relatively specific to the form of music—for example it’d be strange to see a quantified value assigned in visual art. Could you imagine someone grading a recent exhibition at MoMA? **AT**: No but you would see and do see some attempt at quantification for film, and this is going back to the 90s— **NS**: Like Roger Ebert— **AT**: Right, thumbs up thumbs down, which has moved on to whatever Rotten Tomatoes aggregates into a meta review. With Pitchfork, what has always differentiated it from everyone like Roger Ebert to everyone else who uses these kinds of systems is the exactitude with which they purport to evaluate a work—that there is this decimetric precision to how good or bad something is. When you say something is a 7.7, you’re saying it’s not a 7.6 or a 7.8, it’s exactly this valuable. And there isn’t the vagueness of even a star system, like one to five stars. It’s like they’re trying to surpass any kind of interpretability of the score or any admission of generality that a three-star review might imply, and instead it’s conveying this scientism. **NS**: It’s strange because although it has the appearance of exactitude or science, like the bell curve, it’s a much more relational type of number. The reason why a score is 7.7 instead of a 7.6 is because perhaps another album was given a 7.6, and we need to look at that album and assert that this album is better. So, in a way, it’s following a line and that line of is drawn in relation to a series of points developing off of each other — and that’s what you have here: a distinct distribution of music reviews. When you look back at a previous year and look back at all the Best New Musics of 2010 or whatever, you see a series of cultural values that Pitchfork’s writers have given, and then you see distinct numerical scores given to them. And it’s always strange because you’ll have someone give something a 10 but often times that’s not the number one album of the year. It’s a very loose, contestable, relational numerical situation where there’s almost a false or psuedo-quantification happening. **AT**: Right, I mean, without a doubt it’s false. There’s also a cynical materialism to it too. I remember thinking that after I listened to Sote’s *Sacred Horror of Design*, which was one of the best things I heard last year and I think truly understood the idea of the artistic experience and like cracked the world open when I heard. And Pitchfork gave it…let me see what they gave it. They have it a 7.8\. And the experience of this album was this completely nonmaterial one, right? To see whatever experience I had of this album reduced to a 7.8 felt very contradictory towards the spirit of music to me. **NS**: I’d agree 100 percent. It’s a way of establishing power or authority, ultimately. It’s an attempt at objectivity that I don’t think is applicable in this context. I mean, it’s obvious that a Pitchfork review is one writer’s attempt at quantification. But, as a reader, we are tasked with responding to the quantification—do I agree with this or disagree with this? People obsess over this kind of situation. That’s why people are obsessed with editorials in general, or op-eds––they want to disagree with the author, and when they see a score, it’s an almost sensationalized provocation. They don’t even have to read anything. They just see this ridiculous number and just spit at it and then you’re on the internet at midnight waiting for the next Pitchfork review—I don’t really think this is the case anymore, but in its heyday, there was a time when I would literally refresh the page at midnight to see the new Pitchfork reviews for an album just to see what value was given to it. And that was the height of indie online internet blog tastemaking, 2008 and 2009, around that time. And I feel that’s been diffused a little bit out of the sheer multiplicity of information sources. When you look at this distribution, I think the safest thing you can do is give something a 7.8\. It’s essentially just affirming the record––and you have to question the goals of writing a review in this way. In this case, I think it’s part of a PR cycle more than anything. An extremely low review or an extremely high review has a sensational quality that’s going to create some kind of rupture in the public discourse. If an album gets the Pitchfork 10 it’s this rare thing. It’s equally rare when records go below 3 or 2 or 1\. I would ask this of the data: since maybe 2009, 2010, as music has become more industrialized, more ubiquitous in our consumption of it through things like Pitchfork, I would only guess that the actual number of mediocre, median/mean reviews has only gone up. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/08/median-score.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/08/score-variance.png) **AT**: Well, let’s have a look…The median has kind of moved around a bit \[fig. 2, top\], but the variance has actually gone down \[fig. 2, bottom\]. **NS**: It’s pretty wild. The freewheeling days of early internet music criticism. **AT**: It’s gone down by…what is that…by more than 30 percent since 2001\. So you’re right to an extent. Scores have begun to hug the middle more over time. **NS**: I think what that shows is just that literally it has become less independent. When you had a larger deviation of scores, you had pretty distinct perspectives that were making extremely diverse assertions about music. You were going to have people veering all the way to the left and then veering all the way to the right, as opposed to more middle-of-the-road reviews, which I think is a kind of normalization, which mirrors every economic trend we’ve seen over the past 20 years— including the American political discourse. **AS**: The relentless homogenization of everything. **NS**: Not to use this word too freely, but it’s a kind of hypernormalization, this literal squeezing of the deviation into this closer assemblage. Things are closer together, they’re restricted and can’t move the way they once could. **AT**: I mean on the one hand, looking at this original chart, there’s something to be said perhaps, maybe, that work does fall along this shape, that most of it is pretty mediocre: There’s a good amount of bad work, and then a small amount of it is truly great. So is there something to be said that this reflects the reality of art? That even if their numerical system is a false objectivity, that in that false objectivity it is making out this shape of how things kind of are? **NS**: I think that’s a narrative we have to question. I think that’s a model that is dominant in the way we look at things, the bell curve, where the majority of work is mediocre and that there’s a lesser extent of very select, genius works. This is a myth we have to question a little bit because it is such a dominant one in western thinking and in capitalism. It is a model we have been programmed to look at so regularly. I would argue—I don’t believe in complete relativism in taste, but I would want to maybe have a less hierarchical and perhaps more distributed model for how we would think about our relationships with art and aesthetic experience that perhaps would look completely different than a bell curve. **AT**: You could almost join these two charts together \[fig. 1 and fig.2, bottom\], and say that the reviews feel almost beholden to reflect this idea of a natural model. And there’s this idea of what I just said: Doesn’t this reflect nature? That the bell curve is natural. Obviously we’ve shown all kinds of problems in history by believing that everything necessarily fits into along bell curves. And the longer Pitchfork goes on, the more they feel they need to hew to this bull curve for its own sake, and that should they deviate from granting things a 7.3, a 7.4, that it is unnatural in some sense. And I think that’s a good idea: Maybe there are more works that if not genius—maybe we should just get rid of the idea of genius works altogether. **NS**: Yeah, and I feel like there are so many experimental and critical models we employ to quantify our experience of listening to music that would be really exciting to talk about and think about. You could propose model after model that completely disrupts the bell curve. And you could use those models in entirely new ways in writing about music as well. The thing that’s kind of depressing about Pitchfork specifically, and how minute their scales get, is you have almost 20 years of history now of them using the same model over and over and over again. And I think you’re right in looking at that data and pulling out the kinds of assumptions that are in it. And when we do look at that data, what we see is the same depressing reality we see everywhere else in our world, which is that things are getting less distinct, more median, more auto-articulated, same after same 7.8 or 7.3 or 7.4\. If you look at the Best New Musics over the last five years over the years prior, we have actually more market ready, market friendly Best New Music. So it’s actually performing an industry function. It’s given value for its ability to perform in a careerist way as it relates to what the music industry wants of it, which is to sell records, to have successful tours, to perform well on streaming platforms. This might be hard to do because it’s subject to the economic flows of history, but I’m curious if the Best New Musics of the last five years have better profitability than the Best New Musics of the 90s or the early 2000s or that time. **AT**: It’s hard to say by just looking at the reviews themselves without pulling in outside data, like tour revenues and album sales or streaming figures and that kind of thing. But what I’d found looking at this data earlier was that the things that Pitchfork gives 10s to tend to be these nostalgic look-backs. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/08/difference-all.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/08/mean-difference.png) **NS**: Oh yeah. Reissues. **AT**: Right, retrospectives. **NS**: Here, we have the idea that hindsight is 20/20\. You get a more perfect vision when you’re able to look back on culture and say, that was the exact zeitgeist of the time. That record really did sum up X thing that happened or whatever. It’s much messier to actually figure out what’s important now, especially when it just gets obscure to the nth degree. **AT**: It feels like a review is no longer taking a risk at that point either, right? If you voice an affirmation for an already established critical opinion, you both take no risk while also portraying yourself as the canonizer, kind of responsible for an album’s renown and its place in musical history. The further back you go, the higher the scores. So by the time you get to 10 years, 20 years, things aren’t really…there’s something hagiographic about the past. **NS**: One of the most memorable Pitchfork 10s I remember was Radiohead’s *Kid A*. That was 2000 or whatever, and at the time, when I was very young, I felt that record was undeniably a perfect 10\. It was the tome of what a good kind of experimental music record could be, based on my education and music listening at the time. And as much as I thought it was this obscure, weird sounding album, in 2000, it’s not like Radiohead was a small band at this moment. It was this very branded decision for Pitchfork to give that record a 10\. A lot of other publications, mass media music publications, were decrying and talking against their shift in sound from *OK Computer*. Everyone was acting surprised. But that was a shift for Pitchfork too, because I think their popularity rose exponentially after 2003 and into the late aughts. I also wonder, what’s the distribution of adjectives that exists in music criticism text. **AT**: You mean the number of adjectives? **NS**: Yeah, like how much does the music critic depend on description of sound by using adjectives and how instrumental is the adjective to our understanding of what sound’s meaning is? There’s a tendency to narrate music, to describe it using descriptive words, like “rough” or using metaphors and like “dropping water on steel”. **AT**: As you see it, what’s the problem with these words and how should one write about music? **NS**: With the practice of writing about music and regularly quantifying it and trying to substantiate that quantification, oftentimes we have to go to the actual text and look at the words that are used to give things meaning. So in order to support something’s 8.8 or whatever, we have to look at the adjectives that are used to celebrate them and establish its meaning in English. Oftentimes this language isn’t an actual defense of the music as being substantial in any way. This writing doesn’t contain political arguments asserting its meaning, or social commentary. We might get flashes of that every once in a while in reviews, but I would say the dominant method for defending the status of the quantifiable score is in this type of descriptive language, these flimsy words—you can just peel them off like paint chips, they just come right off, and what are you left with when peel all those words out? What are the actual claims being made in the music review itself? When you look at these reviews, what is this person even trying to say? That this is some funky thing? This is like a funky piece of music? It’s really hard to locate what’s actually substantiated in the language, the quantity that’s represented as a number. That’s why I’m interested in adjectives specifically, or cliches, because I feel those are the first line of defense. **AT**: So it’s almost like the quantification of the value has to justify itself, and almost by using these words, each word has a value in itself, and aggregated on top of all the others, that amounts to this mosaic that equals an 8.1 or whatever. **NS**: Yeah, because as we’ve already said, the number embarasses the language. And the writer knows that and has to substantiate it in language. That’s the brief given to the writer—they have to substantiate it in writing, they can’t just give a number. One of things we see are a whole host of assumptions that reflect the basic assumption that’s made in the quantifying of the music itself. And you know, I just have ideological differences in all that. And we have to—I mean, I do that shit all the time too, I regularly use language like that to describe music. **AT**: I use language like that all the time too. Like “stark”, I always use the word “stark”. Not with sound necessarily, but we use adjectives to describe things, like “ethereal”. If it’s “ethereal”, do you have to not say it’s ethereal? **NS**: I don’t really have a problem with those words and in fact I do think they conjure certain images. Often, these words are relationally established words that we’ve come to understand very specifically—that’s one of the amazing parts of language is the way that it’s coded to have these specific intertextual meanings and when you pair them together they create these cool structures that are poetic and expressive and can get to the heart of things. The thing I’m trying to say is, the relationship between those words and the number is completely in question, and the tactics used to defend the number in language is something I would like to see further substantiated and I’d like to tease out the claims being made. Or it could just be pure poetry. And if it’s just pure poetry, that calls into question the use of the number even more. Basically what you have to do is describe…it’s kind of, I’m sure in film there’s these tropes in writing. In film criticism, the film critics often say: “don’t just narrate the plot,” it’s frowned upon in film criticism. And in a lot of ways, music criticism doesn’t have that. Music criticism wants you to narrate the architecture of the album because it’s not evident most of the time. It’s actually just not apparent. It’s just a hallucinatory kind of thing to listen to music. **AT**: I guess what I’ve always seen in Pitchfork’s language though is they keep running into the inability to do that, right? You have your own thoughts about writing about sound. I don’t think it’s impossible to write about sound, but I think it’s harder to write about sound than it is to write about most anything else. **NS**: Definitely, and I think music’s hallucinatory quality makes us really dependent on certain language tropes and really makes us lean on specifically the adjective and this really descriptive language to give it substance. Essentially we’re carving narrative into sound automatically by using those things or we’re giving it something that it just doesn’t have—that being language—when we talk about it. Or we have to talk about it through metaphor or we have to give it social or political valence in order to do that. I think in the actual review text, there’s a very formal or structural things I’d want to be aware of. If we were to isolate certain paragraphs in what a paragraph is trying to do, say the review is seven paragraphs, you’d probably have three or four of those paragraphs just describing the album. You’d probably have one or two of those paragraphs giving some kind of social or political context, broader and then specific to that artist’s career or something. So you have these very specific critical agendas that are actually coded into individual paragraphs in a music review. This might be a larger data project, but almost like give those numbers or something. As far as I’m concerned, if we look at that deviation thing \[fig. 2, bottom\], if we are getting more and more similarly scored reviews, I would also argue the actual shape of those reviews, the text of the review is becoming more and more alike. So basically we’re getting these regurgitated forms that follow very specific scripts that are giving the same scores to probably the same music in similar ways. So I mean, what’s the point at that juncture other than to affirm general PR campaigns? And it just kind of becomes existential at that point. It’s like, well, why do we even write about music? And that’s why I think model of this bell curve breaks. What is actually happening? If you go back and read some of the earlier Pitchfork reviews, there were some truly weird writing. It was an experimental platform in some ways, and as things develop trajectories and the line gets drawn across a longer trajectories, you’re kind of only going to get more uniformity. It’s kind of [what you were saying about *The New Inquiry*](https://components.one/posts/the-production-of-space/?ref=components.news) too. As a publishing platform, I think *The New Inquiry* was originally designed for some pretty rapturous writing or whatever— polemics, critiques, some outlet for a cultural underclass to freely write. But as it became an institution in itself, you had this thing about what it meant to write for *The New Inquiry*, and you had this shape or this form that you’re ultimately—it’s a representation of what it’s actually trying to do. **AT**: This is just length of reviews. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/08/lengths-graphs.png) During the interview, the standard deviation (bottom right) was used to measure the variance of article length. This was arguably a mistake, although arguably not: While the standard deviation is considered formally improper method for the measure of variance for non-normal distributions (like the right-skewed distributions of review length), it is considered so because of the weight it places on outliers—in this case, unusually long articles. The discussion surrounded the idea of a normalization of writing in Pitchfork. If that type of homogenization had occurred, it would essentially preclude the existence of outliers almost altogether. It’s possible that although even if formally improper, the standard deviation, given the weight it does place on outliers, is a valid measurement in this particular instance. **NS**: The length has gone up. **AT**: Well the variance of length has gone up \[fig. 4, bottom right\]. The length over the years is kind of across the board \[fig 4, top right\], there’s no real pattern to it. And this is the distribution of review length just across all reviews \[fig. 4, top left\]. And this doesn’t tell you much, the fact that the median review is around like 700 words. But this is the variance of length. So there’s much larger variance than there used to be. **NS**: Is that with reviews or features? **AS**: It’s with everything that has a score. So at least in terms of the size of reviews, we might have to be a bit more charitable to them in that regard. And that kind of brings up this other question, which is, isn’t there something good about Pitchfork? At the end of the day, I would rather Pitchfork exist than Pitchfork not exist with nothing to replace it. It’s still a music publication owned by Conde Nast, doesn’t have to write about Sote at all. They could completely ignore that music entirely and there would be no major publication discussing them. So in that graph of seeing their variance go up, I want to take the opportunity to say something nice about them. **NS**: It might just be that they’re publishing more so there’s more variance just based off of the scale of what they’re publishing. There’s all kinds of things that could be going on with that. **AS:** But they’ve actually kind of leveled off \[fig. 5\]. Now it’s like 1200 reviews a year. I don’t know how that compares— ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/08/number-of-reviews.png) **NS**: That’s a lot. I mean that’s like a machine, that’s so much writing. Which is cool, I mean I like that fact of it. I think one of the things I want to highlight is that there are a series of assumptions that I think come with the model, and I think sites like Pitchforks that quantify the aesthetic experience in the way that they do it, I think that is the kind of narrative thing you’re talking about, how it matches certain economic models that exist in other fields. But I also think it exists in quantifiable lists and rankings of content as well, which kind of falls outside the purview of the review. But it is something I think is ultimately a capitalist way of thinking. **AT**: And like the American university has been decimated by this system, right? My own university, Temple, their business school was in a rankings scandal for fabricating this data. **NS**: Because they could attract more money by inflating these numbers. **AT**: The whole ensemble of benefits that come with having higher rankings in *US News*. **NS**: This is the same problem we experience in almost everything. And in a way I almost like that flattening. If anything that capitalist realism does, it flattens this kind of spectralization that we think music is this special little thing we can escape, but when we see how it’s turned itself culturally, we see the same old shit. And in that way, I think that flattening is beneficial because it allows us to see things for what they are sometimes and the motivations for certain tactics that are used in publishing and criticism, the line of review rankings or whatever. But my thing is like, there’s so many other models we could be using for how we talk about music. Does it have to be this very obvious one that reflects a very specific set of values? And that’s …Of course the thing is, how would we ever mount that? How could we get people to write on those terms or whatever? Because this is what’s understood. And then we get into a very specific political discussion. **AT**: This is the problem with a lot of data visualization itself. Hopefully it’s not the problem with what we’re doing right now. But with the first piece I made for Components, it was like the fetishization of order and numbers. The instant you attach a number to something or the appearance of a quantitative method to something, you put it out of reach not just to most people because they don’t use those methods, but even the people who do understand those methods are still pulled in by the sheer gleam of its presence, the fact that you know where the glow of that light is coming from, you can’t help but feel like warmth of it. **NS**: The presence of the number almost makes the language embarrassing, if that makes sense. Say something gets a negative review. Like today, James Blake, singer, producer, one of my favorite artists in like 2010, 2011 because he started this new production style of like spatial dubstep music while also being a singer-songwriter, he’s made this new album, he’s gotten really mainstream, a review got published by one of the few Pitchfork writers I still respect, a guy named Philip Schurburne, he gave the record a 5.8\. I’m friends with him on Facebook and he posted this thing was like, “Had a rough day on Twitter today,” because he was just getting flamed by all these fanboys of this artist because he gave the record a 5.8 after Pitchfork has had a huge history of giving his records Best New Music. So basically like, you know he’s a phenomenal writer, but the presence of a 5.8 was so scandalous to James Blake’s fans that then they could look at Philip Schurburne’s writing and just tear the guy apart. The writing becomes this flimsy defense where the number’s presence and it being such a strong authority almost attracts human beings to look at the language and they just start ripping it apart. And the language actually does become ridiculous at that point because you start looking at it and the number is just laughing at the language. The number doesn’t give a fuck about the language and the whole thing just falls apart. **AT**: Neither gives a fuck about the other. **NS**: It’s almost this weird odd couple. Then you look at the language and memes starts getting made, taking quotes from the writer. If you abstract any sentence from it it just looks ridiculous. But he has a point to make about James Blake’s career and he did a good job about talking about it in some way. And if you were just chatting with the guy about his opinions on music over a beer—he lives in Barcelona, at a bar in Barcelona, I’m sure you would have a much better time talking about the record or actually learn more about his opinions on the record. **AT**: But like, you could have a version of that conversation without the number. Remove the number and you’re having that conversation at the bar. **NS**: Again, I think it’s the authority that gives it that sensational quality and basically roots the whole thing to be part of this apparatus where you *want* people to have that reaction because you want to put things nice little places and rank them. And everyone loves to make lists. It’s a huge thing human beings love to do. I love to make lists too. There’s a big difference I think between making a list of 100 to 1 with 1 being the best and 100 being the worst, and having a crazy list of fractals spreading out in all different directions. **AT**: The need for taxonomical order is so strong that even when we know the number is bullshit, we can’t help but react to it and be affected by it in some way. **NS**: We either celebrate its presence or are oppressed by it. It’s literally a stand-in for power. It ultimately removes nuance from what language and writing about music effectively does, which is a very subtle, intimate reflection someone is having on a listening experience. And the presence of the number is absurd. It is absurd. It’s like…what? It haunts the writing in the most crass way. **AT**: The number is necessary for Pitchfork’s existence though, right? Conde Nast owns Pitchfork because Pitchfork publishes a number that people click to see. Remove the number and they would not be a property of Conde Nast. And that kind of goes back to this question of— **NS**: Capitalist realism. **AT**: Well that certainly, I mean everything comes back to that question. But the question of not having Pitchfork at all with nothing to replace it versus having it as it is. And the capitalist realist reaction to it is like, this is the best you’re going to get actually. And within the confines of the system in which we live where we demand quantification, measurement of everything at all times, Pitchfork is maybe the best version of that you’re going to get. I mean, whole else are you going to get? Fucking *Rolling Stone*? **NS**: Yeah, maybe on a mass scale. And I think this is why we see experimentalism as a minor form. You see these homegrown music writing communities or journals or all types of things that people flock to to deal with this problem. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/08/triangle-gif-manual.gif) ### The Production of "Space" URL: https://components.news/the-production-of-space/ Last updated: 2025-09-23T19:48:40.000Z A few years post-recession, a band of newly minted Ivy League graduates found themselves shut out of the literary establishment and hung their own shingle with *The New Inquiry*, an online publication that the *New York Times* [once branded](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/fashion/new-yorks-literary-cubs.html?ref=components.news) as a “roving clubhouse that functions as an Intellectuals Anonymous of sorts for desperate members of the city’s literary underclass. *The New Inquiry* trafficked in the dense and half-intelligible and Parisian, as if written by academics exiled by graduation. Over the years, the publication became (seemingly) one of the largest fora for essays by people in media studies, critical theory and literature. Students and their professors from the New School finally had a committed home online. Now, eight years after the *Times* called it a cradle for “literary cubs,” *The New Inquiry* has positioned itself as a non-negligible farm league for the same apparatus that once rejected its writers, posting them at places like *The New Yorker* (one as a staff writer) and *The New Republic* (as published... For God’s sake, is there a way drop some of these New’s? Maybe some other magazines could be referenced? But they *did* go off to work for those places, to New This and That. Maybe there's a place other than *The New Inquiry* altogether? But that really *was* the outlet I discovered the basis for this essay. Maybe something else could work instead of the New School? But few places conjure the same association with the steely polysyllabism developed for decades at the New School, which also, being based in Manhattan, has a tighter relationship with the publication. After I wrote that, I googled “‘New School’ ‘New Inquiry’” to see how tight that relationship was. The second image result is [a screenshot of text](https://www.are.na/block/2126770?ref=components.news) that links to a page that begins, “Rachel Rosenfelt is a co-publisher of *The New Inquiry*, the creative director for Verso Books, associate director of the department of Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism at The New School, and a 2017-2018 member of NEW INC.” NEW INC is a project of the New Museum. --- The basis of this essay goes as follows: One night, I went to *The New Inquiry*’s website and wandered around for no other reason than to see what the place was up to and realized that I kept falling upon the word “body”. Bodies were everywhere! They were in the articles, in the subtitles, in the publication’s tweets. They were found in stretches like, “When Sandra Bullock undresses in *Gravity*, she reveals less a body than a machine. This is workflow cinema\[.\]” Or, “The body that refuses the parameters of the medical test is an unlucky body.” Or, “‘Cure culture’ (a term used by the autistic community to describe the apparatus of institutions and discourses which pathologize the autistic body as an object to be rehabilitated by medicine) prompts the nation to secure itself from the presumed threats which autistic embodiment pose to the neural future of its citizens.” Occasionally, these bodies would merge with another element and become something even greater—there were not just bodies, but bodies and spaces, two small nouns that when joined together emitted the intellectual energy of nuclear fusion. “The cane, itself a designed object, is a clear marker of the differential (often antagonistic) relations that design produces between bodies and spaces/places, and between non-standard and standard bodies.” Or, “Unlike Motta and Lubin-Levy’s sexualized spaces without bodies, Grindr delivers sexualized torsos tiled in the no-space of a smartphone screen: bodies without spaces, pure grid and no mass, frictionless, smooth erotic pulses.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/data-1.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/data-2.png) A plausible explanation behind the inclusion of certain words in **The New Inquiry* is that, as its essays tend to run longer, it’s more likely to include any words. This could help explain why its median ratio is 1.83:1, meaning that of the sampled words, half of them are used 1.83 more times frequently than in other publications on average, and half of them are used less than 1.83 times more frequently. (This calculation is Boolean: if the word occurs in an article, it has a value of 1\. There is no measure of the number of occurrences.) Both “body”/”bodies” and “space”/”spaces”, however, are even more frequently used. At their respective ratios of 3:1 and 2.75:1, they’re 1.75 and 1.52 median absolute deviations away from the median, arguably hugging the threshold of significance. Both terms used together have a ratio of 6:1, 4.94 deviations away, and placing the two terms together in 97th percentile of word ratios. One might huff that this analysis mixes like with unalike—this is a graph for the ratios of single words, but “body”/“bodies” and “space”/“spaces” together are two words. That is fair and valid. But methodological purity aside, whatever unalike things have been imposed on the graph above, the fact is that the appearance of “bodies” and “spaces” together in the same text is 500 percent likelier to occur in\_ The New Inquiry \_than anywhere else sampled, a ratio that sits comfortably among “homogenize” (with a ratio of 5.89:1), “complicity” (5.96:1), “commune” (6.05:1) and “interchange” (6.10:1). I brought this up with friends. Had they noticed the preponderance of “bodies” and “spaces” among this class of writers too? One replied by sending me this tweet: > Pitchfork: King PU$$Y Eater revolutionizes our perception of bodies and spaces with his hit single “Goop on Ya Grinch” \[7.6\] > > — mustard tiger (@JucheMane) [April 14, 2017](https://twitter.com/JucheMane/status/852949235981012994?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw&ref=components.news) --- “Bodies” and “spaces” were traditionally used together squarely in the domain of science, medicine and mathematics. There are Minkowski bodies and cell bodies and convex bodies and multivesicular bodies; there are extracellular spaces and vacuolated spaces and Banach spaces. At least in the English speaking world, for most of the 20th Century, these terms rarely found themselves joined in the same document outside of scientific journals or patent filings. Gascia Ouzounian, a professor of music at Oxford, pins the period when “space” specifically began its mass migration to the humanities to in 1974, when the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre released *The Production of Space* and “helped launch a notion of spatiality that included in its scope the body, action and the constructed environment.” *The Production of Space* was translated into English in 1991; reviews of its translation typically acknowledge its impenetrability. “The complexity of Lefebvre’s arguments, and their elusive character, make it very difficult to interpret precisely what he means at any particular juncture,” the geographer Tim Unwin wrote. “This is not only because he develops similar notions in different ways throughout the book, but also because his sentence construction is frequently opaque…At one level, Lefebvre’s project was to get people to rethink their ideas about temporal explanations of society. Readers are forced to think anew by the very complexity of the language that he uses…What matters is not so much what he wrote, but rather the reactions that the book evokes in his readers.” More than trying to advance any specific argument, Lefebvre ultimately wanted to fold the very consideration of space into critical discourse. The Marxism of his day was the recognizable dialectic between capital and labor, but it was missing an important piece: what about space? There is not simply a relationship between workers and capital, but between workers, capital, and the land on which production depends, the cities the workers inhabit, the offices they work in. Each of these is produced by and produces the other: capital creates the condition of the worker, the worker reproduces capital, which produces space, which produces the conditions of the worker and capital, and so forth. “Since…each mode of production has its own particular space,” Lefebvre wrote, “the shift from one mode to another must entail the product of a new space.” The nature of these modes of production, of the ways that capital reproduces itself, can be gleaned from “decoding” these spaces. And that spatial “code” effectively involves everything that space contains: “\[A\] spatial code is not simply a means of reading or interpreting space: rather it is a means of living in that space, of understanding it, and of producing it. As such it brings together verbal signs (words and sentences, along with the meaning invested in them by a signifying process) and non-verbal signs (music, sounds, evocations, architectural constructions).” Lefebvre believed in the potential of what he called “Moments”—transient events of awareness and transcendence beyond capital. These Moments can include sudden perception of how capital operates, and to Lefebvre, that could mean revelations about the production of space. In order to hazard a small example of space within his understanding, I’ll offer a “Moment” I recently had: This winter, I went to drink a cup of tea at a place called The Bean, a coffee chain in New York City. As a matter of fact, I went there to drink tea and read [a review](http://lukebutcher.blogspot.com/2011/02/review-production-of-space.html?ref=components.news) of *The Production of Space*. I had my cup of tea and I loaded the essay on my browser and started to read and realized I couldn’t, because just as I opened it, Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” came blasting out of the cafe’s speakers, which made concentration impossible. My instinct to react with frustration instead yielded to a Moment in which I realized that the inability to focus on something like Marxist spatial analysis wasn’t a mistake of the cafe. The music—and every song that came on before, and each one after—was a sound that mostly neutralizes critical thought, something actually contraindicative to Moments themselves. The Bean was exactly the type of space our current mode of production (one in which the various cognitive effects of pop music have become so central) would generate, and it’s exactly this kind of space that would continue to perpetuate that mode. This wasn’t an effect explicitly intended by the cafe or its workers, it’s just what happens in the kind of space that capital, in 2019, happens to produce—its spatial progeny. To Lefebvre, there are three spatial planes in my event at the cafe. First, there’s the physical space of the cafe, which is nested in the physical space of the city (including what Lefebvre calls “the arrogant verticality of skyscrapers”), and so on. This is Euclidean space. There’s the area inside my own mind where my feeble attempt at a thought collides with sound. This is mental space. And then there is the network of entities that bring the cafe into being—the LLC or private equity company that owns The Bean, the bank that credits the LLC, the political apparatus drafting laws that allow LLCs to shield owners from liability, the supply chain that brought the tea from abroad to my cup in Manhattan, the system of music production and dissemination that put Avril Lavigne on the speakers, and on and on. This is abstract space. Situated in and producing this space, is, of course, the body. “Theoretical thought…has re-embraced the body along with space, in space, and as the generator (or producer) of space,” Lefebvre wrote. The human body itself, according to Lefebvre, is sine qua non to the understanding of space, both by constructing it and being part of it. And the body is what *experiences* this space. It’s what experienced the loud music from the speakers, what filled the chair I sat in that created the space for others around me, etc. As Unwin writes, quoting Lefebvre, “\[he\] was eager to reincorporate the body into his analytical framework. He was particularly concerned that ‘Western philosophy has *betrayed* the body; it has actively participated in the great process of metaphorization that has *abandoned* the body; and it has *denied* the body.” The three types of space, thought Lefebvre, were mistakenly confined to distant disciplines that ought to be reconciled. Mathematicians and the like studied Euclidean space, psychologists and the like studied mental space, and the abstract material was left to sociologists and theorists and the rest of them. Instead, just as capitalism was really a trialectic between capital, labor, and space, so too did space involve three critical constituent parts, and properly studying it would involve the consideration of all three at once, along with an understanding of the body’s role in creating, being created by and experiencing these spaces. “Epistemological-philosophical thinking has failed to furnish the basis for a science which has been struggling to emerge for a very long time…That science is—or would be—a *science of space*.” This is what Lefebvre wanted *The Production of Space* to do—to forge the foundations for a new field of science. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/data-3.png) An approximate proportion of academic articles on Google Scholar that both contain “bodies” and “spaces” in a scientific, mathematical or medical context, or in a patent. Behind this graph is something of a mess: article text can’t be pulled from behind journal paywalls, so the only text available to analyze are brief Scholar previews (e.g., “…many lesbian spaces (like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival) have excluded lesbian-identified male-to-female transsexuals. Through an analysis of historical inclusion and socio-political exclusion, this essay examines the relationship between ‘birth bodies,’ gender and…”), titles (e.g., “The materiality of gender: looking for lesbian bodies in transgender history”) and publication names (e.g., “Journal of lesbian studies, 1999 Taylor & Francis”). his isn’t quite enough text for topic modeling or any type of custom classification system that is both reliable and doesn’t consume massive resources. The best, quickest solution is to search for specific words, prefixes and suffixes that identify the subject matter of the article. If any of the available preview text, article title or journal name contained any in a somewhat slapdash list of words (in this case, ‘sulfate’, ‘sulfide’, ‘equation’, ‘differential’, ’embryo’, ‘patent’, ‘ology’, ‘cell’, ‘medicine’, ‘math’, ‘ceous’, ‘medical’, ‘surgery’, ‘surgical’, ‘milli’, ‘centi’, ‘giga’, ‘methyl’, ‘iod’, ‘immuno’, ‘osis’, ‘particle’, ‘convex’, or ‘electro’), the article was classified as belonging to a discipline other than the humanities or social sciences. That includes partial words, so “math” captures “mathematical”, common in journal names. Which is to say, this list is hardly complete; the only way to classify these texts with any certainty would be to do so manually. That means that ****more articles of the scientific/patent variety have been left out, not the other way around**: the actual results of this graph, if performed with total accuracy, would look much starker, with larger values on the y-axis before 1991\. This is particularly likely given the linear relationship between the growth of these words in the humanities and social sciences with the mentions/citations of Lefebvre’s work in journals, as seen below. That relationship even seems to extend to the drop-off in both mentions of his work and the uptick at the end of the scatterplot above—a development left unexplored here. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/ec/f0ec8f30-845f-4eec-ad69-9a1be55b8693/content/images/2025/09/data-4.png) Last year, someone asked the British Library Reference Service on Twitter what the service’s most requested book was. It was *The Production of Space*, [requested 701 times](https://twitter.com/BL%5FRef%5FServices/status/983993287093743618?ref=components.news) between 1997 and April 2018\. At the library at the University of Virginia, where I first checked it out, the book had a four-hour limit on its use due to high demand. Lefebvre was not the first to use “bodies” in a non-scientific context, and he wasn’t the first to use “spaces” in those contexts either—in that regard, he had plenty of company in 1970s French philosophy. But whatever its influence on the field of geography and urban studies (and judging from the treatment it has received from influential geographers like David Harvey, that influence is vast), and whatever the extent of its causality, *The Production of Space* was a large, influential work amid a movement of language as a new way of writing took root among a generation of intellectuals and academics. After the 1991 English translation of his book was published (and around the time people like Judith Butler were also using similar terms), “bodies” and “spaces” were adopted en masse by people outside the fields where the terms were traditionally used. Twenty years after its publication, papers with “bodies” and “spaces” in Google Scholar were more likely to come from journals of the humanities and social sciences than of medicine, biology, or mathematics, or from patents. Until quite recently, that development would have struck me as damning evidence for point made by Noam Chomsky, which for years stood in for most of my stance towards the language of the academic left: > If you look at what’s happening, it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. Suppose you’re a literary scholar at some elite university or anthropologist or whatever. I mean, if you do your work seriously, that’s fine, but you don’t get any big prizes for it. On the other hand, you take a look at the rest of the university and you’ve got these guys in the physics department and the math department and they have all kinds of complicated theories which of course we can’t understand, but they seem to understand them, and they have principles and they deduce complicated things from the principles and they do experiments, they find either they work or they don’t work. That’s really impressive stuff. So I want to be like that too. So I want to have a theory. In the humanities, in literary criticism and anthropology and so on, there’s a field called “Theory”. We’re just like the physicists: They talk incomprehensibly, we can talk incomprehensibly. They have big words, we’ll have big words. They draw far reaching conclusions, we’ll draw far reaching conclusions. We’re just as prestigious as they are. Now if they say, well look, we’re doing real science and you guys aren’t, that’s white-male-sexist, you know, bourgois-whatever the answer is. How are we any different from them? Okay, that’s appealing. This isn’t wrong. Chomsky’s assertion that non-science academics have co-opted the language of math and science is literally true: Lefebvre considered his work to be the beginnings of a new science, and as the adoption of “bodies” and “spaces” over time throughout the non-scientific fields shows, the co-optation of that language is exactly what happened. Frederic Jameson, in his short essay “On Jargon”, admitted to something along these lines himself: To demand clarity in writing, he wrote, begs the question “why in a time when all the other sciences are becoming increasingly specialized and impossible of access to the layman, the study of a complex society like the capitalist one should be any easier.” But while Chomsky's take isn't totally off base wrong, my support for his notion—that the difficult language of philosophers and academics is nearly always a distant abstraction divorced from reality that serves no useful purpose—has unraveled, if not entirely, then enough to make me empathize with Jameson more. We *should* conjecture at the structure of things, and those structures usually take on counterintuitive forms. The starting point for discussing them is often a philosophy based in experience and perception, and that philosophy will have a texture different from the brutally prosaic style that Chomsky employs in his books, which, for all their immense value, often amount to prosaic enumerations of American bombing campaigns. I’m sure most of us who formed our political identities by discovering Chomsky at some point recognize the criticality of that type of work, but there’s a limit to its potential (especially aesthetically). Jameson’s exhortation that in order to grasp capitalism in an era in which it has colonized every last element of life, one must essentially understand everything—human libido, the subconscious, space, and so on, into all domains—seems more reasonable by the day. So Chomsky’s caricature may actually raise a question he didn’t intend to ask: Among this generation of intellectuals—the contemporary Marxists, postmodernists, the critical theorists, all those things adjacent to them and every combination of them—why *isn’t* there more science? Or maybe more accurately, where did all the numbers go? So much of *Capital*’s tedium owes to Marx’s long passages of arithmetic. And the few successive efforts at real empiricism, such as in Pierre Bordieu’s *Distinction* and Thomas Piketty’s *Capital in the 21st Century*, are so lauded (and cited) that one wonders why their methods of data collection and verification are not more often employed. Instead of science, why do we always end up with lyrical scientific gestures? I’ve shown the graph of the growth of “bodies” and “spaces” to half a dozen people and asked for their interpretations. Each answer contained different details, but each also ended on the same admonition that to answer the question fully is incredibly difficult, would require a thorough intellectual history of the growth of these words, and that one could spend a dissertation’s worth of work doing so. This isn’t a dissertation, though; it’s a few thousand words ruminating on a few graphs, which I acknowledge to deflect as many castigations of not having mentioned this and that as possible. There are boundless possible causes behind this graph. One is the capture of science and economics departments in the United States by corporate interests that have little inclination to reach out to feminist scholars and figuring out how experimentation can be brought to bear. Another is the increasing specialization across all domains that discourages anyone from doing anything that falls outside the tight confines of a hyperspecific doctoral program. One can imagine other explanations without too much effort. But while the specific, proximate causes of the growth of “bodies” and “spaces” could take up at least a one-day conference, the reality of any situation involving people is this, stated in terms as commonsensical as Chomsky himself could possibly want: Humans are mimetic creatures; we copy shit other humans do. It’s the tendency that spawns a thousand New Things. Increasingly, for the past century, we have formed identities based on images and celebrity, and we—associating the behaviors of celebrity with the bounties of celebrity—copy what celebrities do. As more people copy a specific behavior, others copy the behavior not of the celebrity but of the group, and trends form. Academics are people, therefore they are subject to mimicking the behaviors of celebrities. Therefore they are subject to trends. And since, for many decades, an American academic’s impulse for celebration has had few plausible objects to mimic in the United States, they have looked to Paris, one of the only places in the world where intellectuals are regaled with Hollywood-level attention, and they mimicked them instead. Once the behavior became established in on the other side of the Atlantic, the Americans could just begin mimicking each other. In 1974, in the *New York Review of Books,* the economist Robert Heilbroner (of the New School lol) wrote an admonishment that I think bears on the use of these sorts of words: “Marxism has no claim to be, and surely is not, the *only* mode of comprehending reality, including that aspect of reality on which it sheds a more vivid light than any other, namely, the historical and existential nature of capitalism.” The adoption of scientific terms emanates a feeling of objectivity, of *immutability*, that there is in fact no other way of comprehending reality, just as there is no feasible way of understanding organisms without extracellular spaces. It gives an impression that the empirical work has already been done. Often, it hasn’t. Often, it can’t be, and often it needn’t. But sometimes it can be, and sometimes it should.