00:03:03 · Ruby Justice Thelot
The, quote, unquote, urban genres like hip hop and rap tend to do way better on YouTube than they do on radio. Country, on the other hand, choosing Texas as a country song, is much more radio based. And so the fact that the plays on the radio counted, whereas the YouTube plays did not count, also tilted the charts towards more country. And the last here is fragmentation. If you don't have these big monocultural event, I'm talking about a Taylor Swift record, I'm talking about a Bad Bunny record, you end up with a bunch of micro, you know, microcultures that are called, like, isolated cultures, and the song that just gets slightly above all the rest, in that case, at about 20,000,000 streams per week, that song ends up being the number one song. Now what's interesting about this, and I really wanted to go and and and take a little deep dive in this, I wanted to say, okay. What's a good example of a song we could compare choosing Texas to? And so I picked Drake's God's Plan. God's Plan came out in 2018, was number one for eleven weeks. Now this is, like, a range of streams. The weekly streams from Choosing Texas were from... This is for The US only, 19 to 25,000,000. So just as a broad, like, percentage of the population, you know, on the low end, it's probably only 5% population who's hearing, who's, you know, maybe playing the song. Now importantly, the streams count plays and not people. These are not individual people necessarily. A person might listen to a song over and over again. Now compare this with God's plan, where we were anywhere from 50, so double, and at its peak, a 100,000,000. So using, of course, a broad proxy of, like, let's say, if the plays are one to one with people, proxy, this is an approximation, of course, maybe 25% versus, like, 5% people might have heard the song at least once. Right? If you take a look at all these streams of a song like God's Plan, at its peak, it had 0.6% of all streams, right, of the weekly streams in The US market versus, right, 0.1 for choosing Texas. So five times more prominent, five times more listened to in terms of all the music that's being, you know, played in The United States. Of course, you know, there's a... The whole, like, sales portion of this, but I think that's what really makes it interesting. So it was kind of a perfect storm.
00:05:48 · Ruby Justice Thelot
So how is it that some of my friends who listen to a lot of music, they're music heads, they read music blogs, have not heard of the song. Why does Pitchfork need to have an article about how no one's heard of choosing Texas? Because of lack of competition, a change in the calculation that favors countries, specifically because of the radio, and the fragmentation of culture, right, which was what we talked about in one of the last episodes. If you compare June Texas to other large songs, it has not nearly reached the same threshold. Right? It is five times smaller in weekly streams than God's plan, which explains maybe why it doesn't feel as popular in spite of being number one. There's a lot of very interesting things that, you know, as I was reading how these things are calculated, how these things are very, very interesting, right? And so even if, of course, Langley's music would make its way, would probably have some YouTube plays as well, there's a slight tilt, a slight preference for people who listen to specific music based on the platform they want to use. So, you know, we talked a little bit about this last time, but what we're seeing here and part of what we're trying to discover process with the process of the show is to uncover the segments of culture and ideally try to quantify them. So I think this, like, this kind of research is very interesting because I think it puts a specific number, a specific multiple. We can now understand from an order of magnitude why is it something that is successful may not actually be as popular as we think it is. I also took a look at Joseph Shake It Off. She's like the undisputed queen, of course, of all streams, and we see similar results on that front. Famously, actually, Xi dethroned Choosing Texas. So... Okay. The second thing that I want to come back to is the idea of paratechnology. Right? This was a very hot topic when we were streaming earlier this week. And so I wanted to bring some more color as to what are the different kinds of paratechnology. So you'll remember, paratechnology is technology that you buy or install on your device that changes how you use another technology. Sometimes it's your phone itself, sometimes it's social media, right? It is locks, app limits, simpler device that is promising you that you will have better control over your own limited attention.
00:08:35 · Ruby Justice Thelot
And so I've broken down paratechnology into four categories, right? The first one, of course, is the subsequence of the hardware. So the first section of hardware is physical barriers. This is your brick, as we talked about. So the brick, you need to go in and tap the brick in order to get access to your phone again. The second is the yonder pouches. Of course, we talked about the sales that we saw in the government procurement contracts. These devices physically restrict the access to your devices. Another good example is the K Safe, a bit less popular, a good example of that. It is a time safe, so you put your phone in there and you can't open it for thirty minutes, an hour, so on and so forth. Now, in that same hardware category, you have the restriction and then you have the simplification. And this is where you have your Punkt, your Light phone, sometimes the Remarkable counts in that as well. Meadow. Right? These are alternatives. These are separate devices that usually pick specific, highly useful apps. Usually, it's gonna be maps, music, sometimes photos, but no social media. And you might still have your phone, but you have a dedicated alternative so that when you go out and about during your day, you no longer need to refer back to your functionally divergent and highly distracting cell phone. Then on the software side of things, right, we also have the restrict access. This is your digital barrier. This comes baked into Apple devices, namely when we think about screen time, but there's other services like Opal, One Sec, ScreenZen, which are digital locks on specific websites, specific software, where if you've passed your time over ten minutes or fifteen minutes, you can no longer access the software you want to use so deeply. And then lastly, there's the idea of calmer interfaces. These are planar home screens, there's blank spaces, dummify. These are things that remove the visual triggers of the, let's say, interface that are designed by the usual operating system. One of the things that I'm noticing now, specifically in the age of AI, you might have seen this thing pop up recently. A person was able to code their own interface for their Roku TV. They were able to remove the ads using AI. And so I think in this software simplify use, there's going to be a lot of personal creativity. Meaning, users who see the examples and decide, hey.
00:11:24 · Ruby Justice Thelot
If my Roku is not... My Roku homepage is not how I want it to be, and I've seen someone already do it and change it, then I can also build my own calmer interface. And when I talk about a desire for us to be more self determined and decide how we use technology, this is, I think, where we're gonna see the most, I think, let's say, individual creativity where, okay, how do I remake my home screen? How do I remake my mail app in order for it to serve me? And so this calmer interface, I think we're gonna see a lot of products come out, but I think we're gonna see a lot of tinkering, you know, a lot of homebrew software at that intersection of simplification and software. And why I think this this this intersection is the most important is because hardware is a little hard to do still to this day. Right? You you can't expect someone to build their own phone. However, the problem with just like a main bear is that you you might have different needs. Right? But the calmer interface allows you to select how you want to simplify your own relationship with your phone. And I think that's the most important part. Because if you just have a sort of blanket, calm or dumb homepage or whatever it is, that might not specifically meet your needs. What I want us to recognize, I think, is that we are all different, and we all have different needs from a technology. Sometimes I jokingly say that I think it is crazy that we all have the same phone in 2026 because we're all so different. And so if I had to bet, of course, right, we're we're we're often making predictions here at Media Studies, is that we will see the rise of calmer interfaces but made by individuals for individuals because people have specific needs as to how they want to make and design their plain, quote unquote, interfaces. So we're gonna keep an eye on PARC technology. Of course, we talked about it recently, but it is still, I think, very much on our mind as people deal and reckon with, of course, their limited attentions. The other one, I think, is super, super fun. Now if you're online, you're probably aware of the phenomenon of the Etsy witch. An Etsy witch is a person who, on Etsy, sells curses, hexes, protections, What I can only describe as a metaphysical product, protection or attack, of course. It could be, dark arts or, whatever the white arts, whatever it's called in Harry Potter.
00:14:12 · Ruby Justice Thelot
And it's very interesting because they've seen a big rise in the last, I wanna say, five years. Right? When I took a look at the Google Trends, I saw a hundred percent and fifty... A 150% increase in the popularity and search terms for Etsy witches. They're big in the news because specific political candidates or political pundits got hexed, and it seems that some of these curses may have worked, right? But let me go back a little bit. The Etsy witches are very interesting because they've been on the internet for a long time. Even on the Usenet, there were early examples of people being arcane with technology. On eBay, there was over 100,000 people selling these metaphysical products until eBay then banned them in 2012. Technically, they were also banned on Etsy in 2015, but it seems that they found some kind of workaround to still be on the platform. When I took a look at TikTok, it seemed like in spite of us having a lot of conversation... There's a there's a New York Times article run run by TM Brown. Shout out TM, Teddy, a friend of the pod, who wrote about this in 2023. Right? He said in his article, was a big biz. People were making a lot of money selling these curses and protections and hexes, in spite of it, of course, being banned on Etsy since 2015. And yet, there's a bit of a disconnect between the amount of news that I've seen and reports I've seen on Etsy witches and then the presence on some of the TikToks. So we have a couple of viral posts oftentimes, but by and large, the Etsy Witch tag itself only has 20 ks. The Witch talk itself is much larger. But it's very interesting to see whether or not people are actually buying these things. In the article, we're seeing quite a bit of revenue driven to some of these vendors. I looked at it myself and to get a career spell, it's $12.05 There's some that are a bit more expensive, 50. But, yeah, we're seeing, I think, these very interesting novel businesses based on this connection between faith, belief, witchcraft, and technology. We'll spend some time at a later time really going deep into this connection between technology and faith and religion. But I think the signal is really hot. One thing we're taking a look at right now is, the upcoming book by Laura Pitcher, of course, another friend of the pod.
00:16:55 · Ruby Justice Thelot
Laura's book is called This Message Is For You, and it studies this relationship we have with faith and algorithms. So This Message Is For You was a, it's a hook, if you will. It's the first sentence on, a lot of TikToks, which were meant to be a little esoteric. So if you encountered the specific video, the specific short form content, and it said, start with this message for you, it meant that you had been selected by the album to receive this blessing, to receive this positive message or whatnot. And so in Laura's book, think she studies the history of our ascribing of supernatural characteristics to a lot of different technologies. Oftentimes, when I talk about these topics, I like to go back to sort of early and early tech. Right? There's there's a few books on this. There's the Victorian Internet. That's a book on the topic. I'm a big fan of Haunted Media by Jeffrey Sconce. Right? And Jeffrey's premise is very interesting, that all media is haunted. My own sort of turn of phrase on this is that with every new technology, we find new ways of believing. Jeffrey's example is the spiritualists who, upon the invention of the telegraph, sought to use it to speak to the netherworlds. Right? Because it had wireless communication, I guess they assumed that it could connect to the heavens, the dead people, it was used in a lot of these supernatural, procedures in which people were contacting the lost loved ones, or even try to predict the future. And with each new technological innovation, I think we often see this, right, with the radio. There was radio surfing, the ability to hear coded messages in the radio signals. Same thing with TD static. People often saw and heard specific messages or codes or signals in the TD static. And so do I think that the algorithm is different right now? I think that the technology is different, right? But I think our impulse to ascribe these supernatural capabilities are still the same that we had in Victorian England with radio, with TV. It is now just with the algorithm. So in other words, right, this whole thing on the Etsy witch. With each new technology we have new ways of believing.