The Pusherman

Online Parasocial Relationships, Deleuze and AI Detection

Morning Comrades.

To start, this is not a return to form per se, as I am not only tired, exhausted from work but also due to the fact that I have not really figured out how I feel about this platform, and specifically writing on here since the pangram implementation. For those that missed it, briefly, the powers that be decided to implement a tool from a company called pangram which allows everyone to easily scan every text published on here to see if it was written by a human or an LLM. I have explained my worries and concerns about it here, that, funnily enough were described back to me as my typical old man grumblings, which I can be, but to be sure, but I still stand by them and if anything they have, negatively, grown since then. For one, I did not understand then how tools such a pangram worked, what they were and thanks to smarter people such as Anarcasper and JHong I learned a lot more and am even more convinced that my initial response to this nonsense was warranted and remains warranted. J really went through the mechanics of what these AI detectors are, how they work and the numbers behind them all, and below is an example of their writing that I appreciated and learned from, I suggest you subscribe to both of them if you do not already.

To keep the matter of this AI detection tool short, I am disabling it for a plethora of reasons, some of which I have explained on Friday and in addition to the the points provided by both people above, in regards to false biases to data mining, with lots of questionable realities in between. If this doesn’t sit well with you, fair, I am not going to pretend even to listen to arguments for this and you are free to not read, support or be interested in my musing, which, in case it gets lost in translation, is meant as kindly as I possibly can be and ultimately leads to the point of today’s ramblings, but to end that thought process this wrapped it up nicely for me:

There are plenty of reasons to distrust Pangram….false accusations (sometimes career destroying) that often hit left-wing writers and outlets, overconfident detection claims, and bias against academic or highly structured writing. I opted out of AI training on my work, and I’m opting out of this too. Anyone who doubts me can see my handwritten, dated notes and decipher them on their own (yes, I still handwrite everything).

I’m not feeding another model so it can get better at hiding.

A lot of this then compounded itself into a larger topic at hand. There exists a double sided Parasocial relationship, possibly even a third dimensional interactive and inter-reactionary between us, the user, them the platforms and vice versa as well as the followers, subscribers and readers. Now, the reality of Parasocial Interactions and ultimately Parasocial Relationships have been ben studied in-depth and will continue to be so, thankfully. Specifically, in this case with us the writers and Substack, today, but we can trace this back to every iteration of what is called “social media” going back to MySpace and even earlier with chat forums.

The technical, legal and financial relationship is relatively straight forward, Substack provides this backend, the publishing tools and pushes that writing in form of an email to those that subscribe for it. For this, they get a cut of my earnings from the paid subscriptions and that’s essentially it. There is more, questions of ownerships of both writing and email lists, that lawyers can decipher but even those, technically, belong to the authors. Neat. Until this platform, like all of them beforehand, had to grow, became a social media platform, something I still am ambivalent about, and the relationship changed, as all do, in life and in this online space but importantly, so did the feelings attached it. Over time, and I cannot free myself from this phenomena, users of social media platforms develop feelings for these spaces. There is a large debate in that Psychology Academic Bubble whether or not these feelings are valid, as they are engineered by the platforms themselves and I welcome anyone to get into that should they want to.

Historically, the existence of PSR’s go hand in hand with the ever decreasing reality of third spaces in real life. My own relationship with that reality is exemplified from very positive experiences in the early days of the internet and being part and ultimately moderating chat forums, specifically StonerRock.com and a few other ones like Digg to what exists now, predominately total disdain for places like Instagram, that I used to sell t-shirts on 10 years to this place, ultimately a digital third space away from the community built on IG 7 years ago now. Similar to IG, I have a lot of reservations about what this platform has become and similar to IG I tend to ignore some of them as they, or rather this place still provide a purpose. All signs of unhealthy relationships according to my therapists who naturally bemoans my tendency to ignore red flags and have a borderline masochistic nature when it comes to relationships, again, a story for another day. The arc here is that Substack, the company, has created a false sense of community that is inherent to the nature of the internet, especially Web 2.0 and due to the realities of our capitalist existence has to exploit this for returns of their received investments.

The effects of this reality can be understood through Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of subjectification and their analysis of capitalism’s production of desire. Rather than encouraging the formation of political organisations, shared institutions or collective capacities, for example, the platform fragments discourse into thousands of personalised channels in which the writer functions as a recognisable brand whose perceived intimacy with subscribers becomes the primary commodity. Capitalism, as they argue in Anti-Oedipus, does not simply repress desire but continually decodes and “reterritorialises” it, redirecting social energies into forms that ultimately reproduce its own conditions of existence.

The desire for political engagement, intellectual community and social transformation is therefore channelled into the repetitive consumption of an individual author’s reflections, opinions and emotional disclosures, producing an illusion of participation while simultaneously insulating readers from the unpredictable encounters, disagreements and organisational labour through which genuine collective politics emerges.

This process exemplifies the production of molar identities from molecular flows of desire. The subscriber is encouraged to identify not with a movement or class but with a personality whose consistency and authenticity become objects of investment, while the author is incentivised to cultivate an increasingly recognisable persona capable of sustaining attention within the competitive marketplace of digital content.

What appears as independent intellectual production is therefore inseparable from the platform’s economic logic, in which visibility, engagement and subscription revenue reward the continual reproduction of personal attachment over impersonal political analysis. The consequence is a form of political consumption in which readers come to experience proximity to the writer as a substitute for solidarity with others, mistaking affective familiarity for collective organisation and reducing politics to an ongoing relationship between producer and audience. Desire is captured by an apparatus that continuously territorialises it around the figure of the individual rather than allowing it to circulate through the rhizomatic networks of collective struggle, leaving subjects more emotionally invested than politically organised and more connected to personalities than to the material conditions that produced their discontent in the first place.

This, then comes in addition to the relationship we writers have with the platform when change occurs, as it naturally does, and often for the worse. A few years ago a petition started to remove far-right writers from Substack, which was duly ignored and given the finger to when tools such as Andrew Tate are invited to this platform. The same applies to the introduction of pangram to this site. Now, taken the above into account, it is clear that the relationships lived by all of us with these platforms are to varying degrees romanticised in such a way that dialogues are the basis of a continuing, possibly even flourishing relationship, but they are not. Substack, like all other companies, can do and are doing what they please, or rather pleases their shareholders and investors, without communicating and no matter how loud we all scream our opposition to the, usually, negative changes, nothing happen. Most of us remember IG before Fuckerberg bought it and turned it into a disease ridden manipulation tool of oppression and douchebaggery. We screamed, they did not and do give a fuck. This necessitates that we finally and ultimately understand our existence, perceived communities and interactions as consumption and consumption under a cancerous capitalistic intention of growth and addiction. There is no relationship here and the implementation of a tool that des nothing other feeding paranoia, distrust, witch hunts, on top of the data we produce on here to be scrapped, sold and fed to a machine that ultimately sells the notion of who is human or not, is, at times, still beyond my comprehension in fuckery.

I do not and have never felt loyalty to a brand, or platforms such as this. They are tools, at best for my entertainment, community, but that word is strive for a reckoning in itself, and honestly, shits and giggles. The moments, when these platforms no longer serve this, and we all have our different points of no return as these processes are always incremental, the disdain grows and a departure occurs, occasionally rapidly more often than not slowly. If this the point for this space is unclear as of today, truthfully, I am angry that I am even thinking about it as much as I am when the majority of my bandwidth is taken up about food, costs, logistics and the ever annoying question is all that still fun and worth the physical price of owning / operating a restaurant and that tension in itself should be a clear indicator of where this is heading, but let’s see. For the time being, fuck everyone at Substack involved in that process and the bullshit behind it, the bootlickers jumping on the bandwagon without a further thought other than, “oh look another shiny new tool” and thank you for allowing to muse on it all here, rather than sending out another too-dense nerd fest of philosophy and history. I do see that and appreciate that, even if I get called lovingly, I am sure, an angry old man, ranting. That, my dear friends, is only going to get worse.

Until then,

Yours, warmly,

V.