I need to catch up with a bunch of your posts and this latest looks pretty ambitious (tour de force? You tell me). So it will be awhile. But one very quick thought: along with the symbolic influencers, at some point it may be worth thinking about the perspective of much smaller fish - reply guys and lurkers and occasional commenters like myself - who have near-zero chance of real influence and usually couldn't care less. For many people on these platforms it's simply about a desire for a little more social connection, or intellectual hunger, a way of keeping mentally engaged, a personal interest in the writer's evolving thought, or even just a comforting ritual. I think this is a key part of any "influence economy" on the demand side (maybe also supply-side in a certain sense), if orthogonal to the kind of symbolic capital you appear to be stressing here.
But this may well be irrelevant to what you're after - not at all confident about any of this (and perhaps comments like mine could be reconstrued as a bid for influence). Just something that struck me while I was skimming.
That's a great point! I have a whole bit on that sketched out for one of my chapters on the "political sociality" of the platform world, part of which tries to map the various actors on to classic political economy roles (not mechanically). Viewing it from the production side, my working idea is to conceive commentators as the commentariat, analogous to the proletariat, or maybe in broader terms, labor. Your comment may inspire me to write it up in more detail!
This is not to say that lurkers and commentators don't also feel some validation when they see a "like" or response. But for many it's not the main driver, nor is validation quite the same as influence. Even if you see them purely as consumers on the demand which might fit into your model already, I'm envisioning *connection* and *participation* as an incentive system in itself, which seems quite distinct from influence. So at the least you'd want a separate category for this. It's funny because I had thought of suggesting hidden labor as an analogy, myself. I like your idea of a commentariat, though I wonder if this would be more heterogenous than the proletariat WRT political economy.
Incidentally: was this Part 4 of that 9-part series you mentioned on platform morality, or 5, or a separate series? You seem to have stopped annotating post. No big deal just wondering since it's nice to keep track. And curious whom you agreed with more in that Dan Williams-David Pinsof exchange (more grist for the influence mill!).
"...the result of the disagreement was not that one author took influence from the other, but that the exchange produced more influence all around: more posts, more comments, more links, more followers, and more commentary and additional essays from other writers. Each now has a larger following than before the episode, a stronger set of claims on the feeds of other users, and therefore holds a greater set of standing commitments to be paid attention to by them -- and along with all that, a greater command over the collective attention space of the platform and the broader community itself. Their stature rose, as did the total amount of opportunities for attaining and exercising influence."
Producing more influence all around from engagement is why if you are really and urgently opposed to someone or to their ideology, you don't engage them, you don't even attack them, you ignore them. And if possible you bury them algorithmically and otherwise additionally. You de facto or literally kill them or what they represent. You enforce and you insist on their non-existence. This is what has always been done by the powerful because it is so effective in maintaining as much zero sum advantage as possible. This is of course what Musk does at his most nefariously effective. And establishment intellectuals and scholars and politicians are professionals at this. They only engage or attack when the opposition is already too prominent to ignore, or when they are not so threatened by the opposition that they can use the opportunity to increase their own prominence even while marginally increasing the prominence of the marginal or any other rival. The goal of imperial hegemony is to create as much zero sum reality as possible in its own interest. Where not possible it similarly weaponizes non-zero sum activity and influence.
Meanwhile the establishment builds its own positive sum influence networks and ideologies that fill the available attention space and crowd out the buried as effectively as any direct suppression.
I need to catch up with a bunch of your posts and this latest looks pretty ambitious (tour de force? You tell me). So it will be awhile. But one very quick thought: along with the symbolic influencers, at some point it may be worth thinking about the perspective of much smaller fish - reply guys and lurkers and occasional commenters like myself - who have near-zero chance of real influence and usually couldn't care less. For many people on these platforms it's simply about a desire for a little more social connection, or intellectual hunger, a way of keeping mentally engaged, a personal interest in the writer's evolving thought, or even just a comforting ritual. I think this is a key part of any "influence economy" on the demand side (maybe also supply-side in a certain sense), if orthogonal to the kind of symbolic capital you appear to be stressing here.
But this may well be irrelevant to what you're after - not at all confident about any of this (and perhaps comments like mine could be reconstrued as a bid for influence). Just something that struck me while I was skimming.
That's a great point! I have a whole bit on that sketched out for one of my chapters on the "political sociality" of the platform world, part of which tries to map the various actors on to classic political economy roles (not mechanically). Viewing it from the production side, my working idea is to conceive commentators as the commentariat, analogous to the proletariat, or maybe in broader terms, labor. Your comment may inspire me to write it up in more detail!
This is not to say that lurkers and commentators don't also feel some validation when they see a "like" or response. But for many it's not the main driver, nor is validation quite the same as influence. Even if you see them purely as consumers on the demand which might fit into your model already, I'm envisioning *connection* and *participation* as an incentive system in itself, which seems quite distinct from influence. So at the least you'd want a separate category for this. It's funny because I had thought of suggesting hidden labor as an analogy, myself. I like your idea of a commentariat, though I wonder if this would be more heterogenous than the proletariat WRT political economy.
Incidentally: was this Part 4 of that 9-part series you mentioned on platform morality, or 5, or a separate series? You seem to have stopped annotating post. No big deal just wondering since it's nice to keep track. And curious whom you agreed with more in that Dan Williams-David Pinsof exchange (more grist for the influence mill!).
Great post
"...the result of the disagreement was not that one author took influence from the other, but that the exchange produced more influence all around: more posts, more comments, more links, more followers, and more commentary and additional essays from other writers. Each now has a larger following than before the episode, a stronger set of claims on the feeds of other users, and therefore holds a greater set of standing commitments to be paid attention to by them -- and along with all that, a greater command over the collective attention space of the platform and the broader community itself. Their stature rose, as did the total amount of opportunities for attaining and exercising influence."
Producing more influence all around from engagement is why if you are really and urgently opposed to someone or to their ideology, you don't engage them, you don't even attack them, you ignore them. And if possible you bury them algorithmically and otherwise additionally. You de facto or literally kill them or what they represent. You enforce and you insist on their non-existence. This is what has always been done by the powerful because it is so effective in maintaining as much zero sum advantage as possible. This is of course what Musk does at his most nefariously effective. And establishment intellectuals and scholars and politicians are professionals at this. They only engage or attack when the opposition is already too prominent to ignore, or when they are not so threatened by the opposition that they can use the opportunity to increase their own prominence even while marginally increasing the prominence of the marginal or any other rival. The goal of imperial hegemony is to create as much zero sum reality as possible in its own interest. Where not possible it similarly weaponizes non-zero sum activity and influence.
Meanwhile the establishment builds its own positive sum influence networks and ideologies that fill the available attention space and crowd out the buried as effectively as any direct suppression.
Indeed. This is the social equivalent of debanking in the economic sphere.