Here's an idea.
Your social media posts might be worth something.
[THEME NOISES]
[DING]
Like sunshine in the spring and goatees in Boston,
the ALS ice bucket challenge has felt
like an inextricable part of the internet over the last month.
For anyone who's been hiking out in the wilderness,
the long and short of it is as follows.
You make and post a video pouring a bucket of ice
over your head, challenge your friends to do the same.
And along the way, you and your pals donate $100 or more
to the ALS Association.
Also known as Lou Gehrig's disease,
ALS or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
is a degenerative nerve disease with no cure
and for which research has been historically underfunded.
And so, by one measure at least, the ALS ice bucket challenge
has been a triumphant success.
According to "Time," at this point last year
the ALS Association had raised $2.6 million.
This year, $88.5 million.
And for everyone who's wondering, yes.
I did do the thing at the end of last week's episode.
So if you missed it, we'll put an annotation to it right here.
Now, along with raising money, the ALS ice bucket challenge
I think also raises some questions,
which I want to ask-- questions about making things
in support of causes and also about the value
and purpose of those things.
So the mechanics of the ice bucket challenge
are actually a little muddled.
According to Know Your Meme, the ice bucket challenge
became ALS specific on July 25th when
Pat Quinn of the ALS charity Quinn for the Win
posted about it on his Facebook page.
He wrote, "you take the challenge.
Then nominate others to do the same within 24 hours.
If they fail the challenge, they must donate $100
to QuinnForTheWin.com."
And since it's grown, there have been three notable permutations
of the elements ice, donation, and challenge-- lots
of "I'm donating," and then ice, and then "I challenge."
Steve Merchant, you just got challenged.
Relatively few "I'm donating" with no ice,
like Charlie Sheen and Orlando Jones.
But mostly ice and then challenge
with no talk about donation even if there is talk about ALS.
Maybe the donation is implied, maybe not.
For lots of people, this is slacktivism at its finest--
people helping only superficially
with a cause instead of affecting "real" change.
And on the surface, sure.
I can see it, narcissistic altruism
through displays of support viz a viz performative
dowsing-- except that dowsing is correlated with an over 35
times increase in donations.
So the ALS ice bucket challenge might
be bad activism in the way sandwiches are bad burritos.
Really, they're just two different things.
A funny challenge video with a humanitarian message
is sort of like a spoonful of sugar
to help the giving money to charity medicine go down.
It also helps if the sugar is Chris Pratt.
--[GASPS] I wasn't gonna do the ice!
The celebrity element surely helps
raise both money and awareness, two things between which there
is an important relationship.
Partially, the premise of the ALS ice bucket challenge
and charity in general is that a little yields
sign is being drawn between raising awareness and support.
Support, however, is not always one single thing.
In a paper for "The Journal of Consumer Research,"
Kirk Kristofferson, Katherine White, and John Peloza
describe the difference between what they term "token"
and "meaningful" support.
Token support is joining a Facebook group
or wearing a button.
Meaningful support is, quote, "consumer contributions
that require significant cost, effort, or behavior change."
Making an ice bucket challenge video is sort of in the middle,
I guess?
And interestingly, Kristofferson, et al.,
found in their study that publicly shared token support
does not in fact lead to increases in meaningful support
down the road.
But still there is an assumption, it seems,
that icing yourself and challenging your friends
will lead to acts of potential meaningful support
through an increase in awareness.
So whether or not they actually do,
does this mean people making and posting ALS ice bucket
challenge videos view their posts
as having potential indirect monetary value
regardless of if they mention donations explicitly?
And if so, does it mean they should
think of every social media post as possessing
potential indirect monetary value?
Each ALS IBC post raises awareness and, potentially,
money for two things-- the ALS Association and the platform
on which it is posted.
This is a foundational idea of social media.
The more people and the more stuff
those people create on a platform,
the more impactful and influential
those people and platform become.
So there's more potential value just sort of floating around.
This is a pretty common arrangement that we have.
Creating and delivering messages have a cost.
But those messages also generate a value
for the people and places creating and delivering them.
That value isn't necessarily monetary.
But, for better or worse, that's generally how we think of it.
Like during Twitter's IPO, someone
made a website that tells you how much your Twitter
account is worth in dollars-- like how much of Twitter's
total market value you have generated.
My personal account is allegedly worth $9,873.19, for instance.
I assume the check is in the mail.
The argument being that users generate all of the awareness
and most of the, quote unquote, "content" for Twitter--
so, hey, maybe they should get a piece of the action.
Similar questions were asked about Facebook.
Don't users provide 100% of the value of Facebook?
Do they deserve a cut for their labor?
And so maybe that's the big question.
Are your social media posts labor
where you are just generating value for someone else?
Ice bucket challenge posts make this explicit.
And it's for a charity.
So you feel good about yourself for participating.
But you could, if you wanted to, view every social media
post this way.
Karl Marx wrote lots about something called alienation.
Workers become alienated from their work
when the products of their labor don't
belong to them but to their boss, who is the one profiting.
Marx talks about how the commodity-- the thing
being sold-- has different kinds of value.
Exchange value is how much the commodity
is worth in terms of money.
Use value is the utility of a thing.
Now, it would be weird to determine something's exchange
value solely by its use value.
If this were the case, we'd end up
charging people to breathe air because it has
an incredibly high use value.
Instead, exchange value starts out
being determined by how much labor it
takes to make the commodity.
Now, when people say, just give money to the ALS Association.
Don't make a stupid video.
What they're saying is that all of those posts and videos
are literally worthless, that you may have labored
but you have generated zero value,
that it is a more worthwhile for you
to quietly dish out some cash than it is for you to make
a public show of any kind.
I think we can say with confidence
that that is not the case.
This terrifying and awful disease
has been put into the spotlight and to the degree
that ALS ice bucket challenge videos now
inspire the same kind of exhaustion
that planking or the Harlem Shake once did.
As weird as it is to say this, I think
that's a good thing, to have heard
so much about this rare disease with underfunded research
that some of us are starting to become sick of it.
I think that knowledge is valuable.
To try attaching or estimating or asking
after the monetary aspect of that value,
though, feels absurd-- tacky, even.
But we have it.
We know what it is.
It's millions of dollars.
It's millions of sorely needed dollars.
All of those tweets and Facebook posts and YouTube videos
are worth, collectively, millions of dollars
but also so, so much more.
You have no idea how every single challenge makes me feel,
lifts my spirits, lifts every single ALS patient's spirits.
You're really, truly making a difference.
And we're so, so, so grateful. [BLOWS KISS] Love you.
In a rare turn of events, I have no specific question
to ask but am just curious about what
you see as the relationship between social media posts
and the ideas of value or worth.
What is the connection that you can draw between those things?
And what do you see your relationship to it being?
Let us know in the comments.
And if you value Idea Channel, you
know exactly what I'm going to ask you to do.
And if you've already done it, thank you.
(SINGING) I didn't lose my way!
Let's see what you guys had to say about "Kill La
Kill" and wearable technology.
First things first, we're taking a little break.
So next week's episode will not be a full episode.
It's going to be a shorter, sort of like two zany ideas
episode while we have the last couple weeks of summer
here in the northern hemisphere.
We're going to celebrate them by probably
looking at the internet inside, to be perfectly honest.
But, you know, a break is a break.
Cameron Bertram let us know that the Japanese characters we used
in the episode were accurate in meaning
but do not actually sound alike and told us
what it is that we meant to say.
So thank you for that, Cameron.
Our apologies for doing that wrong.
Carlos Rangel adds a really interesting piece of context
for this whole thing, which is that there are some schools,
apparently, in Japan that have a waiting list for students
because the uniforms are so good and that the uniform
of the school actually has a lot to do
with its popularity, which I-- wow!
Yes, a whole other level now.
TidMiste brings up Nudist Beach, which
is the organization that is kind of like fighting
against the use of life-fiber clothing in "Kill La
Kill" and a thing that we didn't talk about at all.
And I think what Nudist Beach does
is to kind of exemplify this idea
that there is a-- there's a balance between using clothing
or technology, however you want to view it-- letting
it wear you verses you wear it.
And I think that it doesn't destroy the premise that we
were working towards but sort of-- it
supports it, right, that you can-- you can use these tools
and not sacrifice your humanity as long as you don't let it.
And I think that that is the thing that they do, right?
Even the robots that they are inside of, they're only half
inside them.
And I think that that is a big tell about their attitude
about technology.
Timothy Morrise brings up Donna Haraway,
who wrote a lot about, like, cyborgs and sort of the nuggets
of transhumanism and makes the really awesome point
that it is imperative that Ryuko is both wearing life fibers
and in some sense made of life fibers
and that this is the thing that allows her almost uniquely
to topple this system and that that is, maybe,
the relationship of-- like between people
and their tools that will make it
so that there isn't some sort of terrible dystopian future.
And I think this is a great comment.
Links to this one and all the others in the doobly doo.
Christopher Landry writes a really great comment.
But I just want to point out that his comparison
between "Kill La Kill" and a band saw is genius.
Please read this comment.
It's great.
To DjFobse95, you will be happy to learn
that zero of your tax dollars go towards funding Idea Channel.
Your tax dollars fund foreign wars but not a [BLEEP]
fetishizing cartoons and video games.
So you can now sleep easy.
And finally an historic comment.
Kerrah has our first featured comment from the sub Reddit
and talks about the symbiotic relationship
that exists in "Kill La Kill" between humans and life fibers.
And if you are going to call life fibers technology
that humans use, you could also call humans technology
that life fibers use.
And I think this factors really well into the way
that the series ends.
It is all about finding a balance between, like,
your full humanity and your-- sort of your augmented self
and that that symbiosis is a thing that
needs to achieve a kind of balance
so that the world doesn't go all topsy turvy.
It was great.
Great comment, Kerrah.
Thank you.
Merthsoft, also from Reddit, asks the really important
question whether or not you can call living things technology,
right, because life fibers are alive in some sense.
And there was actually a section of the script that ended up
in the rubbish bin because of time sort
of asking and confronting this question.
And I think the answer is like a yes, maybe or yes, but.
And there's a really great "Atlantic" article
about horseshoe crabs as a bio-- like a "biomedical" technology
that is just mind blowing.
So I'll put a link to that in the doobly doo.
But this is-- this is a great episode--
this is a great question and maybe a future episode.
Who knows?
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these charitable individuals.
We have a Facebook and IRC and a sub Reddit,
which we will continue to be reading comments from.
And the tweet of the week comes from @LowChaParty,
which points us towards an article about what happens when
the Simpsons becomes dad humor.
I'm old.
[THEME NOISES]
[DING]
And for this week's Record Swap--
which is the second to last-- we are
going to be replacing "Highway Man" by Wayland Jennings,
Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson
with "Music Has the Right to Children" by Boards of Canada.
This was actually the first piece of electronic music
that I purchased.
I got it on the day it came out.
I bought it at the same time as Vladislav Delay's
"Anima," which is also one of my favorite records of all time.
I'm super excited to put this up on the wall.
I'm a little sad it's going to be stuck in the corner.
I'll be fine.
I'll get over it.
All right.
Adios, "Highway Man."
And welcome-- a big and awesome welcome-- to Boards of Canada.