Technology and Society
Not-So-Funhouse Mirrors
December 3, 2018
So, a for-profit “Christian” “university” founded by an evangelical pastor that is being investigated for fraud is connected to some 140 LLCs that, among other things, run Amazon storefronts selling cheap goods at high prices as well as a publishing empire (also being investigated for fraud) that purchased Newsweek magazine at a bargain-bin price (firing Newsweek journalists who began to investigate their owners) and, incidentally, also runs storefronts including a bookstore that isn’t exactly running like a bookstore (you want to buy a book? Are you sure?) . . . it’s a wild story. Art history professor and sometime-journalist Jenny Odell has pulled all the threads and ended up with a big ball of “what the heck is going on here?” for which she has no answer. It’s as if someone created an artificial intelligence bot and trained it on a mix of Amazon shopping habits, money laundering practices, and prosperity gospel evangelism before setting it loose to whir and spin off fraudulent businesses, a web of simulated reality that somehow is profitable.
This kind of unanticipated use of platform capitalism isn’t entirely new. Remember when, just after Amazon launched its self-publishing platform, weird books started showing up for sale that were random compilations of Wikipedia articles? Perfectly legal, because Wikipedia articles are in the public domain, but the packaging was designed to defraud people, and it often worked. I suppose we could go back to the early days of printing and the ways printers jumbled together stuff and sold it before the concept of copyright vested power in authors to control their work so it couldn’t scamper away and reproduce in unexpected places. Or we could contemplate machine-generated academic papers (so much more efficient than writing them!)* and automated essay graders (so much more efficient than reading them or, you know, teaching students anything).
It’s not without precedent. But there is something disturbing about the complexity and sheer weirdness of this scheme, as if it pulled some bits of modern life together into a shell company game where they began to replicate feverishly – website after website, company upon company, a simulation of contemporary commerce, all of it . . . melted into air, thin air. It’s fitting that one connecting thread Odell found among all of these businesses and websites is the word “dream.” This web of enterprises is made of such stuff as entrepreneurial dreams are made of. Great globalization shall dissolve, their cloud capped towers and gorgeous palaces made of baseless fabric, an insubstantial pageant.
I’m reminded of James Bridle’s creepy discovery of a wormhole in YouTube that sucks in small children whose parents unwittingly hand them a phone playing a kids’ show hoping for an hour of peace. An entire industry has sprung up to warp children’s programming. Yes, some of it is deliberately twisted by trolls who want to