Jackals, False Grails
Nothing is fake when everything is information
In Paul Fussell’s 1983 book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, he launches into the topic with a straightforward binary: whether your job is safe or dangerous. He quotes Andrew Levison, disputing the American myth that traditional class distinctions had vanished: “American workers must accept serious injury and even death as part of their daily reality while the middle class does not…Imagine the universal outcry that would occur if every year several corporate headquarters routinely collapsed like mines, crushing sixty or seventy executives.” Forty years later, “safe” work is practically synonymous with computer usage, while its counterpart is more diverse, encompassing a wide range of jobs that are physical—not necessarily hazardous but still straining the body in various ways. A couple of years ago, in a tweet I can no longer find, an updated version of Fussell’s dichotomy appeared, predicting that only two types of jobs would exist in the near future: using computers, and bringing things to people who are using computers—a condition foreshadowed by the pandemic concept of essential workers, as contrasted with “fake” Zoom-and-email remote jobs. The rapid evolution of AI, meanwhile, raises questions about how many of the fake computer jobs will even be available for humans to do. The computers themselves will do more of them, leaving us to deliver stuff to one another.
This material/immaterial distinction, despite its enduring relevance, is increasingly unstable and obscure. Even the most inherently physical things, like clothing and food, can cross the threshold, the way so much labor has. In this week’s episode of the New Models podcast, the hosts describe Shein’s ultra-fast fashion as the “divirtualization of data”—the company takes search terms, digital tags, and word clouds and converts them into physical products, which are then purchased online, shipped to the customer, unboxed, and then promptly “revirtualized” as social media imagery or purely symbolic objects. Shein makes real clothes that people wear on their bodies, of course, but its supply chain, as described above, evokes the image of a contracting material world, with the information still embedded in physical objects being squeezed out of them and thereby liberated to circulate freely. Shein isn’t importing the internet into the physical world; it’s reframing that world as an array of objects and processes that haven’t yet become digital but soon will.
For a cheeseburger made in a ghost kitchen, the brand that is slapped on at the end is an ingredient as essential as the bun. The ongoing commoditization of material objects and processes necessitates an information layer that makes the output legible online. A recent analysis by brand consultancy Nemesis examines another Chinese company, Anbernic, which sells video game emulators and “seems to be an aggregate of Chinese manufacturers presented in the westernized idiom of a brand, in the form of a website, a logo, a color, and a few other basic elements.” Anbernic is what Rob Horning calls a perfunctory brand. As Nemesis writes, “the brand is almost nothing, i.e. a minimum viable coordination point that aggregates (ideally positive) impressions of a product and makes it discoverable.” All it requires is a meaningless, SEO-friendly name, a logo, and “perhaps a 100% lore-free ‘About Us.’” Anbernic, like Shein, attests to a tagged, searchable world where people and things pass between the online and offline realms with minimal friction—a world where mobility and free flow are the highest forms of meaning. We deride “fake email jobs” because we still instinctively equate the material with the real. But when information is the only currency, materiality is just metadata.
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Reads:
The End of the MrBeast Era—digital entropy and what it feels like to reach “the logical endpoint of an internet that’s been flattened into a samey, straightforward sludge of optimized content.”
“Walking into a bar that has decorated itself thusly reminds me of watching a spy or crime or detective film that is set in the 70’s for no reason other than to avoid having to write around the fact smartphones exist.” This is a good newsletter.