[Music] i shall start with free air television commercial television especially united states now think

about they were a very strange kind of thing of good because they could not be commodified they were
more like a sunset how can you make people pay for it so what happened was their broadcast was used
to magnetize the attention of the audience before selling the attention of the audience to advertisers
when there is a will there is a capitalist way of commodifying things and then advertisers use the access
to people's arrested attention to do something quite audacious to enlist emotions which had escaped
commodification so far to the task of deepening commodification let me give you an example because
that sounds a bit complicated it isn't really i don't know how many of you have watched that great
splendid serial mad men with don draper being the archetypal brilliant advertiser at the heart of
madman there was this scene when he's coaching his protege a young woman called peggy on how to
think of a chocolate bar a hershey bar draper caught the spirit of the times when he said to her peggy
you don't buy a hershey bar for a couple of ounces of chocolate and i'm quoting here you buy it to
recapture the feeling of being loved the feeling that you knew when your dad brought you one for
mowing the lawn so this is it it's the co-modification of nostalgia the nostalgia that was never
commodified is being used by draper okay in order to hyper commodify a chocolate bar that was a
turning point of capitalism draper i mean the fictional the person who's writing the draper role was
putting her or his finger on a fundamental mutation in the dna of capitalism efficiently manufacturing
things that people craved that people already craved was no longer enough with the rise of the big
conglomerates in the 1920s 30s and especially after the second world war the rise of what john kenneth
galbraith that wonderful economist of the 1950s that variety of capitalism that emerged from the rise of
the conglomerates especially after the second world war with the heavy role of government in
regulating the global economy with bretton woods and so on he called it the techno structure what
changed with the techno structure was that simply manufacturing things was not enough the point of
manufacturing was not to satiate existing needs manufacturing had become so mass-produced so
efficient that manufacturing commodities had to go hand in hand with manufacturing the desire for
commodities now we are all familiar with how commercial television works this is the linchpin between
the technostructure's capacity to produce all sorts of commodities and its capacity to manufacture our
desire for those commodities then once the internet which had begun life as a plant system came out of
the military and the academic market the universities once however it was cannibalized it was taken
over by commercial conglomerates the internet changed the principles of advertised of advertising it
moved them into something quite different instead of having don draper or the draperies of the world
the advertisers coming up with concepts for commodifying our nostalgia in order to recommodify
commodities the internet allowed for the creation of algorithmic systems permitting person-specific
targeting of advertisements that television could not support we're all familiar with the kind of person
specific algorithmic based target advertising targeting of google or facebook of tick tock and so on now
at first the first algorithms what they did was something quite straightforward they identified clusters of
users people with similar tastes with similar similar search patterns in google in the google engine
similar preferences those algorithms grouped them together to complete their searches to make them
more efficient to suggest books records to them to us films but then came a major breakthrough at
some point the algorithms ceased to be passive once algorithms could evaluate their own performance
they the algorithms began to behave like agents they began to monitor and react to the outcomes of
their own actions at that point they began not only to affect the people they surveyed but additionally
to affect themselves by the way people were affected by them before we knew it the task of instilling
desires in our soul was taken from the don drapers and the peggies of madmen from human beings
running the advertising industry and that task was now handed over to the alexas and to the series to all
those talking algorithms whether you have an iphone an amazon alexa google assistant whatever now
those who question how real the threat of artificial intelligence is to white collar jobs should ask
themselves what exactly does alexa or siri do ostensibly alexa is a home-based mechanical servant in
reality alexa or siri or google assistant or any of those assistants they are just the front end of a gigantic
artificial intelligence cloud-based network that millions of us if not billions of us are training several
billion times every second as we chat on the phone or move and do things while carrying our mobile
phone the system this cloud-based algorithmic system learns our preferences and habits and as it gets
to know us it develops an uncanny capacity to surprise us with good recommendations about books and
so on even with ideas that intrigue us before we realize it the system has acquired substantial powers to
guide our choices effectively to command us with cloud-based alexa-like devices or applications in the
role once occupied by human beings like don draper we find ourselves the most dialectical of infinite
regresses think of what it is that we do in real time real time perpetually we train the algorithm so the
algorithm knows how to train us to do the things that in the interest of the owners and the more we do
this the faster the algorithm learns how to help us train the algorithm to train us to train the algorithm
to train us to train the algorithm to train us and so on and so forth the owners of this type of algorithmic
cloud-based dialectical command capital or i shall call it for short command capital the owners of this
command capital have the automated power to commanders to do things of enormous financial benefit
to themselves now with such special powers i do believe that the owners of substantial amounts of this
command capital need to be called something other than capitalists than traditional capitalists allow me
to coin a term i'm going to call them cloud lists from the cloud where the algorithmic command capital
that they own and which gives them so tremendous power over the rest of humanity that's where it
lives on the cloud so i shall call them the cloudellis now how how are they different substantially
different to the owners of a traditional advertising firm like that featured in madmen a firm whose ads
back then in the 50s and 60s were also convincing us to buy things that we neither needed nor wanted is
there a substantial difference well think about it the advertising firms of yesteryear styling cooper and
associates i believe was the one the fictional one in madman what they did was they sold services to the
corporations trying to sell us things however glamorous or inspired their employees might have been
they were traditional service sector workers highly paid you know usually more drunk than usual or than
other workers but they were traditional service sector workers in contrast in contrast the cloudy lists
who own the command capital to begin with they don't have to have employees these are algorithmic
cloud-based bits of software and the hardware that allows them this infinite regress between our
training them and them training us this command capital as i call as i call it gives its owners whom i just
called the clouderalists two very new and very interesting kinds of power the first is the power that
cloudelists have to extract huge rents from manufacturers in other words from other capitalists from
manufacturers whose stuff they persuade as the cloudless or their command capital persuades us to buy
because the same command capital that makes us want the stuff is the foundation of the platforms like
amazon.com where those purchases take place it is as if don draper or his advertising agency were to
take over the markets where the wares don draper advertises are sold this is big this is not just a mere
extension of a service market the advertiser is not just selling through command capital others goods
but it actually owns the market or has taken over and replaced the market with a platform which is the
same algorithmic cloud-based complex that creates the need in our soul for the staff and sells it to us
even though the owner of that command capital does not own the manufacturing progress uh process
now if you look at it through this prism cloudera lists are turning conventional capitalists into a new
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