I keep thinking about what’s going on with Reddit. Many subreddit moderators say that conversations behind the scenes with mid-level Reddit executives are going fairly well—that there is room for some form of compromise, whether in some more precise targeting of charging for data that keeps third-party apps that moderators use alive or an improved in-house toolset for moderators. But equally many mods are simply stunned by Steve Huffman, the CEO, praising Elon Musk’s management of Twitter and by his aggressively dismissive attitude towards the entire userbase.
It feels to me as if this is the end of large-scale profit-driven social media platforms. Reddit seemed like the last moderately functional, often-useful survivor of the era, now heading for the paradoxical combination of an IPO and a decline into irrelevance and failure.
I’m not the only person to note the profound peculiarity of the major for-profit social media platforms having value only because all the content hosted on their platform was created for free by users, a situation all the more peculiar because one after another, the CEOs and boards of these platforms have declared war on their own users or done their best to make it harder and harder for the users to create content, find information, and feel safe and secure while being part of the platform’s community.
But as I thought about Reddit, I was reminded of a seminal article by the communications scholar Dallas Smythe on the “audience commodity”.1 I came across this essay for the first time during my dissertation research into advertising, and like many other scholars thinking about advertising and its history, found Smythe’s ‘blindspot’ argument really inventive.
What Smythe observed is that scholars on the left thinking about mass communications, most especially television, had a hard time thinking about what it was that the communications industry produced, what its commodity was. As a result, he noted, many leftist intellectuals tended to focus on television and radio programming as ideology, in terms of what they took to be its function in capitalist society. After all, in the era of broadcast television, if you had the device itself (and didn’t live in the United Kingdom), the programming itself was free. The same was true for the radio. So what looked like the commodity made by television and radio—programs and songs—was not really a commodity in the usual sense, produced by the labor of workers, profitable to owners.
Smythe said: no, there is a commodity being produced through labor and sold. It’s the audience. It was the attention of the audience that was sold to advertisers. Who works to make the audience? The audience themselves. What are their wages? The programming. Hence, there’s a kind of delicate balance involved here: the audience must be sufficiently motivated by the programming to produce itself for sale to advertisers. Too much advertising, and the audience might drop away. Too little, and the owners of the television and radio stations wouldn’t be able extract profit from their attention—they would give away too much value with the programming.
This insight started to lose its value for describing mass communications with the advent of subscription television and radio, and even more with direct purchasing or rental of specific cultural works. But I always thought it was a prescient description of how attention worked to produce value online, in digital communications. I found myself wondering this weekend whether communications scholars or others had applied Smythe’s work to digital media. The answer turns out to be yes. In particular, Brian Dolber at Cal State San Marcos has directly applied Smythe to the contemporary situation,2 but so have many other researchers over the past 15 years.3
This is one of the things I find so satisfying in a deep way about academic scholarship: you can be deeply attentive for a focused period on a specific idea or seminal contribution, then turn your attention elsewhere. When you look back, you often find that people have been humming busily along, applying the idea as appropriate to new phenomena.
In this case, it’s an especially productive application. There are two astonishing parallel cases that arose together in the late 20th Century where highly capitalized for-profit enterprises essentially parasitized vast reservoirs of voluntary, uncompensated cultural and intellectual labor. The first was the capture of scholarly publishing and the jaw-dropping stupidity that continues today, in which research institutions subsidize the creation of knowledge that is then given away for free to capitalist publishers who then sell it back to the subsidizing institutions at high costs after adding value through more voluntary labor in the form of peer review. The other was platform capitalism after the first dot-com crash, when free platforms were replaced by platforms which sold user data and sold the attention of users to advertisers.
The political economy of those two parasitizations have diverged somewhat, but both of them have moved relentlessly towards destroying their own value in a remarkably short time frame. It’s tempting to attribute this just to the stupidity and cupidity of the robber barons of the Silicon Gilded Age, to think that this is a result of a handful of men who have been in the right place at the right time to enclose a particular commons but who have understood so little—or cared to understand so little—of the value of what they grabbed that they have badly damaged it in twenty years of plundering.
But I think there’s something deeper going on, and Smythe’s work hints at a structural progression—that successive waves of cultural capitalism have produced audience commodities only to move on eventually to something more like the conventional sale of commodities to consumers. The cycle is faster now, not the least perhaps because the stable leisure time that was needed for the audience commodity of television is no longer available, but also because digital audiences are more mobile within the communications infrastructure. Substack might in this sense be part of a “cable television” phase of online media, where the platform owner takes rents from the direct sale of a content commodity to an audience; elsewhere this is manifesting as a smaller number of high-value media creators going inside workable paywalls.
Part of the issue may also be that many-to-many communications essentially killed advertising rather than proved to be the “killer app” that would allow advertising to be perfectly targeted to its audience. I’ve never believed that advertisers actually wanted to target only people they already knew wanted their goods because advertising is fundamentally lossy by its nature—it requires a sort of imprecision, a semantic slopover, in order to argue to the producers of commodities that there are more buyers out there somewhere, an unfound or undertargeted market who are not the obvious, already-known buyers. The problem with digital media is that the audience commodity is either too well-known (say, when advertisers use cookies that testify to something I already bought to try and sell it to me again, after I’m done) or it is too uncertain that the audience commodity documented by cookies and clicks actually exists at all. Users struggle to separate the signal of actual human beings creating content on platforms from the bots and liars; advertisers and commodity producers have paid out to platform owners for what may be phantom attention.
So maybe it won’t matter what the moderators negotiate with the managers, and there’s no amount of public-sphere mockery directed at Huffman or Musk that can make them realize the potential value locked into the platforms they own, because they’re on a suicide run for reasons that are deeper than their personal greed or egomania. What I suppose I wonder is whether after they’ve burned down the platforms there will be room for those platforms to become something less like cable television—an expensive, ever-escalating series of subscriber fees and streaming services—and more like the telephone, a publically-regulated utility that is maintained because it’s necessary for contemporary societies to function at all. There would at least be a pleasing circularity to that, given that the telephone being a public good of sorts was necessary for the rise of the Internet in the first place.
Smythe, Dallas. “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism”, Canadian Journal of Political and Society Theory. 1 (3): 1–28.
Dolber, Brian. “Blindspots and Blurred Lines: Dallas Smythe, the Audience Commodity, and the Transformation of Labor in the Digital Age.” Sociology compass 10.9 (2016): 747–755.
Lee, Micky. “Google Ads and the Blindspot Debate.” Media, culture & society 33.3 (2011): 433–447. Web; McGuigan, Lee. “Consumers: The Commodity Product of Interactive Commercial Television, or, Is Dallas Smythe’s Thesis More Germane Than Ever?” The Journal of communication inquiry 36.4 (2012): 288–304. Web.