The YouTube Apparatus
Two quick announcements:
My new book, The YouTube Apparatus, was published online today!
The YouTube Apparatus builds on my research on the supply and demand for content, analyzing fifteen years of data from political channels on YouTube. It also investigates the meta-scientific question of how we set the academic agenda—why have we spent so much time studying “algorithmic radicalization” on YouTube?—and introduces the concept of “poetic validity.”
The thesis, put as poetically as I can manage, is this:
Not YouTube Creators but Creatures, the Creations of the Audience and Apparatus
To find out what that means, you’ll have to read the book!
As a special thank-you for your support, subscribers to my blog can download the full manuscript here. Some portions of the text were adapted from blog posts over the past two years, and your feedback has been much appreciated!
Everyone else can download it for free there, too; this a Gold Open Access Publication. This means that I paid Cambridge University Press $7,000 from my research budget so that they would put the pdf on their website. And it speaks to just how stupid academic publishing is that this is a genuine improvement.
The racket run by Columbia University Press, who published my first book, involves selling hardcover copies to university libraries at $120 a pop. According to my royalties statement from last year, they sold I think about 75 of these — coming out to well over $7,000. And there’s no pdf they put on their website.
Of course, there is a legitimate archival purpose to this endeavor. As I continue to fall down the rabbit hole of antiquarian book collecting, I can certainly appreciate the fact that these objects will persist across time. One day, several decades down the line, someone will be able to buy a hardcover of my book from a library sale for $5 and find out what the Baby Boomers were all about.
I’ll dig deeper into academic publishing in a future post. But second announcement:
Tomorrow (4/30) I’m speaking at the MOMA R&D Salon: No More Likes
These salons bring together academics, artists and activists; tomorrow’s event addresses the following themes:
Technology advances in leaps and bounds, but are our lives any better for it? People seem to be increasingly looking for ways to cut back and detox. It’s ironic: iPhone software is now designed to inform you about your screen time in an effort to help you decrease it, and yet all apps are continually made more addictive. Novelty is fast and seductive, and tech companies know we will not resist a glistening new technology until too late—it will be already irrevocably integrated into our daily life. The result is a feeling of whiplash, sometimes even guilt and embarrassment for not having seen it coming. It’s natural to long for a “simpler” time, but what time is that?
I’ll be adapting my previous presentations on the work of Vilem Flusser with some insights from the new book for my brief presentation as part of the salon. The problem, as always, is meaninglessness.
The event will be livestreamed from 6-8pm here, check out the impressive lineup:
That’s it for today; I’ll be back next week with some esoteric metascience.