(2020-10-10) Rao Notes On Textual Capital

Venkatesh Rao: Notes on Textual Capital. You could call me a textual capitalist, a creator and accumulator of publicly traded words (some more traded than others), which enter the public sphere largely divorced from the private contexts within which I manufacture them, persist for a while, and then depreciate and die. This is an interesting thing to be in a world where planned-obsolescence words, and even near-ephemeral words, are produced at an accelerating rate, by an increasing number of word-producers. see prev (2020-02-24) Rao A Text Renaissance

words now inhabit a world where competing kinds of non-textual capital are growing more valuable.

In my career as a sometimes-paid writer, the median professionally written and paid-for public word has gone from being worth say $0.50 in the US to perhaps $0.01. You’d think it’s just not worth writing at that price, at least not for money

Somebody was remarking the other day that the logic of Saudi Arabia triggering an oil war in 2020 has to do with a sense of impending doom associated with the rise of renewable energy. If you think oil is going to be worth much less in a few decades, then you should be pumping out as much as you can, as fast as you can, while it still has value. It feels like textual capital is in the same state, with universities playing the role of OPEC.

If you think words are still worth producing frantically when their value has dropped from $0.50/word to $0.01, it can only mean it’s the only thing you know how to do, and you expect the market to collapse further rather than recover.

If the Saudi Textualia theory is correct, textual capitalism is suffering from what Peter Turchin has called elite overproduction.

The alternative to the Saudi Textualia theory is that we are merely going through a temporary phrase of textual debasement, like the era of Yellow Journalism just over a century ago. That once things settle down a bit, words will once again be valued properly. I believe this theory to be wrong.

The term textual capital points to a tangible thing

weigh all the

memetic equivalent of biomass.

Despite a hundred obvious problems, I prefer the phenomenological idea of textual capital measured in grams of the literal weight of words to vague abstractions like knowledge capital or cultural capital, or idea capital or creative capital. These tempt us into one sort of false consciousness or the other, and presume notions of value that may not be well-posed in every context.

there is a tendency among humanities and liberal arts academics to treat everything as text. (LitCrit)

This, in my opinion, is not a useful overloading of the term, merely a politically expedient one.

does not mean everything can usefully be thought of as a text.

The problem with thinking of almost everything as a text is similar to the problem of thinking of almost everything as a computer

To be a textual capitalist is to accumulate value in the form of publicly traded texts in a common language like English

An even bigger issue with concepts like knowledge capital or cultural capital is that they tend to focus our attention on the largest distinctions

We talk, for instance, of radio disrupting books

We think in zero-sum ways about discretionary time and how it is used

The future of text is being contested at the smallest scales, where words break down into meaninglessness, and reform in new forms not always recognizable as text

On Twitter yesterday, Jess Purviance tweeted something I wish I’d thought of: The meme is to stories as planck is to length. It’s the shortest possible story. A story fragment.

It suggests, in my opinion correctly, that the essence of a meme is that it fragilizes meaning (especially textual knowledge) by atomizing it right to the edge of meaninglessness, rather than encoding it. The meme is, IOW, more mutation than codon

The problem with meme as an analogy to gene, at least when it comes to textual capital,is that it falls into the trap of thinking of words in terms of a 2-level container metaphor

as an analogy it is not the sort of thing that can be wrong. It can at best illuminate some aspects while obscuring others. The problem with this understanding is that it obscures the main feature of memes: their capacity for subversion through fragilization to the edge of meaningfulness.

Twitter creates value by shorting textual capital down to the edge of meaningfulness

Twitter allows between 1 and 280 characters, and allows for various combinations of textual and non-textual (images, gifs, links, screenshots) to appear in juxtaposition to form a unit with memetic potential. It allows each such unit to signal its fitness via Like and Retweet counts, and propagate independently (as a meme in Dawkins’ sense).

Every tweet is a meme at least in the Dawkinsian sense, but most tweets are commodity memes that do very little by way of either propagating themselves, or subverting their textual content by operating near the planck scale. What we think of as meme memes are the ones that achieve enough irreducible coherence in a human mind, and ubiquity on the medium (and beyond) to be noted, named, and documented as such. Let’s call them proper memes by analogy to proper noun.

Aphorisms are a high-value form on twitter, due to their planck-scale stability. So are poetry-like forms that use line breaks in ways that add robustness.

Think about a prototypical meme in the sense the term is used on social media. Like say an instance of the “jealous boyfriend” template deployed on Twitter. The meme has meaning primarily against the backdrop of all other instances using that particular template.

A proper, planck-length meme is a robustly stable blend of textual and non-textual elements that only makes sense with reference to multiple schemes of signification, and dissolves into meaninglessness if disassembled into pure-paradigm media shards. It is to hypermedia as prime numbers are to number theory

The idea of virality has become associated with memes primarily in a Dawkinsian sense. The idea refers to the propensity of memes to spread. But there is a different sense in which memes are viral.

Memes are too often infected pieces of text for infection to be an incidental feature.

Almost all memes in the social media sense are multi-media hybrids, mixing textual and non-textual elements, because that’s one of the best ways to stabilize them against planck-scale stresses.

Memefication of textual capital is atomization plus multimedia hybridization. It is to textual capital as financialization is to the stock market.

Media-hybrid memes subvert not just text, but everything larger scale that textual culture in the form of books supposedly competes with. Static photographs, clips of movies, and clips of songs (think rickrolling) have been memefied. But in general, memefication of non-textual media has been less of a direct threat, and in fact, generally beneficial. From a marketing perspective, it pays to pepper a modern movie with meme-worthy reaction shots and template-izable scenes.

I typically sell my words in bundles, called ebooks, of between 40,000 to 100,000 words at $3-5 each. The monthly subscription to this newsletter, at $5, buys you about 10,000 to 20,000 words a month, but they are delivered much fresher, hence the premium. This is the wrong way to value textual capital in a memefying world.

I would estimate that my top 7 memes account for perhaps 80% of the value of everything I’ve written. Each is worth between tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. In some cases literally, based on the money I’ve earned from them. This is the correct way to value textual capital in a memefied world.

The easiest way to become a textual capitalist is to abuse an old word into a new one.

Once, in passing (in an essay about memes as it happens), I made up a proto-meme with no content — The Great Weirding — that appreciated significantly in value over a couple of years without being attached to anything in particular. When I finally started writing an essay series using it as the title, it was like a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Vehicle) acquiring a privately held company.

Textual capital has a forked future ahead of it. A small, specialized portion of it will continue as a pure-paradigm variety of high-value capital. The bulk of it will be memefied. Textual capitalists should ponder the question of how to adapt to a memefied world.

There is no guaranteed way to adapt to the postverbal world, or make memefication work for you. But you can experiment with shorting textual capital in ways that force you to develop greater fluency with memetic capital. Here are 13 things to try: