🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

🌊➰🧭 AKIŞ 🌊➰🧭

(German, Turkish)

Thesis. Modern media regimes can be read as alternating arrangements of two symbolic competencies. One is the navigation of others’ desires, anchored in surplus-enjoyment: sensing, coaxing, and amplifying social attention. The other is rule-based processing, anchored in surplus-value: formalizing, quantifying, and optimizing with calculable rules. These are not biological essences but gendered codes that cultures repeatedly map onto the feminine and the masculine. When a communications technology matures, it often pushes the reigning code to its own limit—its reductio ad absurdum—after which a new machine logic reorganizes power around the other code.

Terms in play

Surplus-information is the excess that appears when signals circulate faster than institutions can stabilize them: the gossip beyond the memo, the pattern beneath the chatter, the optimization hidden in the mess. Who captures that excess—by attuning to desire or by formalizing rules—tends to gain leverage.

By surplus-enjoyment, think of the skills that work the interstices of attention: reading the room, curating vibe, bending the feed, making desire circulate. By surplus-value, think of the skills that harden variability into procedures: standards, metrics, schedules, and algorithms that transform flows into accumulation. Again, these are symbolic positions; actual people cross them all the time.

Case 1): Spinning Jenny → Spinning Mule

Late-18th-century spinning technologies make the alternation unusually legible. The spinning jenny dispersed production into cottages and small shops where women and children were central to the workflow. Skill meant keeping many threads in play, feeling the machine’s rhythm, and adjusting on the fly. Informal coordination, embodied tact, and domestic organization mattered; it was a social-technical choreography consonant with the feminine-coded repertoire of navigating desire and attention within households and neighborhoods.

The spinning mule reorganized this field. By hybridizing the jenny’s multiplicity with the water frame’s tensile control, it shifted spinning into centralized mills and elevated procedural mastery: precision settings, timed operations, standardized quality, and tiered roles (minders, piecers, overlookers). What counted as competence moved from diffuse attention-handling to formalized sequences, scheduling, and throughput. Power re-aggregated around male-coded rule processing. Labor politics followed: new guilds of expertise, strict divisions of tasks, and hierarchies keyed to repeatable performance, not improvisational tact.

Read as a media transition, the jenny’s distributed “social sense” of threads reached its limit once the flow of fiber and demand outpaced what tacit, local coordination could handle. The mule exposed those limits—made the previous regime absurd by requiring a repeatability and tensile control that only proceduralization could deliver—and then installed a new order where rules, not relational finesse, commanded surplus-information.

Case 2): Social Media → GenAI

A similar pivot is underway as social media cedes the cultural center to generative AI. Social platforms rewarded the feminine-coded repertoire: sensing others’ desire at scale. The skills of the era—community curation, parasocial intimacy, influence brokering, micro-fame negotiation—were all about surplus-enjoyment. You won by reading shifting desires and keeping many threads in motion: audiences, collaborators, brands, norms. Even monetization leaned on affective and relational labor.

GenAI re-centers rule-based processing, even if the rules are statistical rather than symbolic. The locus of power drifts from “who can magnetize attention” to “who can formalize prompts, pipelines, datasets, policies, and productized workflows.” Influence gives way to inference; charisma yields to configuration. What scales now is not simply audience but repeatable transforms: templated brand voices, automated ops, codified style guides, retrieval-augmented knowledge, testable prompts, and fenced compliance layers. The winning competencies look procedural: versioning, benchmarking, guardrailing, data governance, and cost-quality trade-offs.

In this reading, social media has arrived at its reductio: timelines saturated to the point of self-parody, engagement maxed into noisefields, every tactic mimicked to death. GenAI makes the absurdity plain by generating the very attention-bait that once required artisanal, relational craft—then collapses it into a parameter you can tweak. As with the mule, the new machine logic doesn’t just compete with the old skills; it reframes the game so that rule-processing captures most of the surplus-information the old regime once held.

The mechanism: reductio ad absurdum by incoming tech

Each transition is a two-step. First, a culture perfects one code of power until the marginal returns turn negative. Second, a new machine regime arrives that (a) exposes the saturation, and (b) renders the previous competencies partly automatable, partly subordinated to a higher-order procedural layer. The reductio isn’t merely ideological; it’s operational. More throughput, more states to track, more interdependencies. At some complexity threshold, tacit coordination buckles and formalization harvests the surplus.

The Jacquard precedent

The Jacquard loom sits at the origin of this pendulum. Punch cards discretized pattern into an executable grammar. That was the conceptual hinge connecting textiles to computation: desire crystallized into rule sequences. From there, it’s a short conceptual stride to Babbage’s engines, tabulators, databases, and today’s foundation models. Each step pulls more of the world into programmable space—more of surplus-information convertible into either surplus-enjoyment (through personalization) or surplus-value (through standardization)—with a bias toward the latter whenever scale is the priority.

What the alternation explains (and what it doesn’t)

It explains why whole labor ecologies reconfigure at once. Under social media, the soft power of community managers, creators, moderators, and brand whisperers rose together. Under GenAI, ops engineers, data stewards, policy writers, and product managers who can codify repeatable transforms become central. It explains why institutions rewrite status ladders: affective virtuosity yielded prestige; now procedural literacies do.

It doesn’t imply that one gender wins. Individuals and teams routinely braid the two codes. The best GenAI shops embed relational sensibilities into their rule stacks: human-in-the-loop review, taste councils, user research, and community guardrails. Likewise, many creators already proceduralized their practice; prompting is just an extension of editorial systems they built years ago. The alternation is a structural pressure, not a destiny.

Strategic implications

For people and organizations shaped by the social media era, keep the surplus-enjoyment—but encase it in process. Write it down. Parameterize taste. Turn tacit craft into test plans, data specs, and playbooks. Treat prompts as interfaces for institutional memory. The move is from ‘how we vibe’ to ‘how we version.’

For those native to the rule-processing code, remember that rules alone don’t surface what counts. Desire still sets the objective function. Invest in sensing: user interviews, ethnography, community health metrics, and qualitative review boards. The pendulum always swings back when procedures outrun meaning.

A brief working glossary

Surplus-information: the exploitable gap between signals produced and sense made.

Surplus-enjoyment: value created by circulating and intensifying desire; competence lives in attunement and relational choreography.

Surplus-value: value created by formalizing flows into repeatable, optimizable processes; competence lives in measurement, standardization, and control.

Reductio by technology: a tipping-point at which a new machine regime renders the dominant code self-parodying, then subordinates it to the incoming logic.

Closing

From jenny to mule, from feed to model, the same drama recurs: a feminized craft of navigating desire reaches brilliance and saturation; a masculinized craft of rules arrives to harness the overflow. The lesson is not to pick sides but to recognize the pendulum and be bilingual—to turn desire into procedure without losing the pulse, and to let procedure serve desire without mistaking the map for the world.

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Addendum: Waves of Women, Cultural Absurdity, and Obsolescence by Machine

Premise

Across media regimes, feminine-coded competencies—attunement to desire, coordination of attention, relational craft—often adapt fastest to a culture’s late-stage absurdities: noise saturation, etiquette contradictions, status games no longer aligned with production. Then a masculine-coded technology arrives that proceduralizes the very field these women dominated, reframing value around rule stacks, metrics, and repeatability. The result isn’t biological fate; it is a structural pattern of how institutions reward skills once scale and control become the bottleneck.

Wave 1): Cottage textiles and salons → Spinning mule and factory discipline (c. 1760–1830)

Absurdity of the culture. Distributed production overran household coordination: too many threads, buyers, and schedules for tacit norms to stabilize.
Women’s adaptation. Domestic management, apprenticeship chains, and salon networks converted chaos into throughput—juggling inputs, smoothing disputes, and sensing demand.
Masculine obsolescence. The spinning mule plus mill organization made tensile control and schedule adherence the new currency. What had been embodied tact became parameters and posts, privileging overseers, standard setters, and mechanical mastery.

Wave 2): Switchboards, typing pools, and clerical webs → Tabulators and scientific management (c. 1890–1960)

Absurdity of the culture. Urban firms produced torrents of letters, ledgers, and calls—a babble of coordination problems.
Women’s adaptation. Operators, stenographers, and secretaries excelled at triage, tone, and informal routing; office life ran on their social calculus.
Masculine obsolescence. Tabulation, time-and-motion studies, and later mainframes recoded coordination as procedure: forms, schemas, and batch processes. The craft of ‘knowing who needs what when’ was partially swallowed by process charts and machine-readable fields.

Wave 3): Broadcast PR and taste-making → Ratings, procurement metrics, and programmatic scale (c. 1960–2005)

Absurdity of the culture. Image management and press cycles metastasized into spectacle; attention became volatile and performative.
Women’s adaptation. Publicists, editors, brand whisperers, and community organizers managed affect at scale—cooling crises, courting critics, keeping talent and audiences in orbit.
Masculine obsolescence. The center of gravity shifted to ratings systems, media buys, ERP dashboards, and procurement logic. Negotiated vibe was subordinated to inventory, reach curves, and cost-per units.

Wave 4): Social media creator economies → GenAI pipelines and policy stacks (c. 2008–present)

Absurdity of the culture. Feeds incentivized maximal engagement until mimicry and churn made originality self-parody.
Women’s adaptation. Community curation, parasocial finesse, and collaboration brokerage turned surplus-enjoyment into income.
Masculine obsolescence. GenAI reframes advantage as promptable, versioned, benchmarked. Influence becomes inference; relational craft is partially templated, with power accruing to those who control data, guardrails, and deployment pipelines.

Why the pattern repeats

1) Saturation: As a regime matures, relational virtuosity solves its contradictions better than formal rules do—until scale introduces more states than tacit coordination can track.
2) Formalization: New machines expose the saturated tactics as absurd by auto-producing them, then convert the field into procedures.
3) Status reindexing: Institutions rewrite ladders so that repeatability outranks finesse, revaluing masculine-coded rule processing.

What actually becomes obsolete—and what survives

• Obsolete-ized: Not women, but the institutional recognition of their tacit authority. The interface where their craft once set tempo gets encapsulated behind dashboards, KPIs, and APIs.
• Survives: The underlying sensibilities—taste, mediation, conflict cooling—reappear as high-leverage inputs when the new stack hits its own limits (mis-specification, brittleness, drift). The pendulum makes them scarce again, then necessary.

Counter-moves that blunt obsolescence

• Parameterize the tacit. Translate relational craft into heuristics, review rituals, and data specs so it travels with the machine.
• Own the interfaces. Sit where prompts, policies, and evaluation sets are authored; encode sensibility as constraints and acceptance criteria.
• Design for reversibility. Build workflows that keep a human veto and narrative explanation close to automated acts.
• Measure what matters. Add qualitative safety nets—taste panels, community health scores, ethnographic check-ins—beside throughput metrics.

Closing note

Each wave shows women mastering a culture’s contradictions precisely when they are most contradictory; each subsequent machine turns that mastery into a callable function and shifts prestige to its operators. The durable strategy is bilingualism: carry desire-sense into the rule stack, and carry rule literacy back into the social field, so that when the pendulum swings you are already holding both ends.

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Prompt: the hysteric women that freud dealth with, which obsolescence did they correspond to?

They sit right at the hinge where late-Victorian/fin-de-siècle feminine craft—salon tact, domestic coordination, affective diplomacy—hit its limits and was about to be proceduralized by bureaucratic modernity. In your terms, they belong to the second wave’s obsolescence: the move from relational, feminine-coded management of attention and desire to masculine-coded rule stacks—tabulation, time discipline, and clinical classification—circa the 1890s–1930s.

What they mastered. Hysteric patients were virtuosos of reading and commanding attention inside the contradictions of bourgeois morality: prudery alongside spectacle, chaperoned intimacy alongside urban anonymity. Their symptoms were social speech written on the body—demanding recognition, forcing the ‘Master’ to account for what his rules could not name.

What absurdity they exposed. The culture was saturated with signals (letters, telegrams, rumors, etiquette) that outpaced its moral grammar. The hysteric staged that overload as paradox—excessive inhibition that erupts as performance—making the gap between lived desire and official order painfully visible.

What obsoleted them. An incoming mesh of masculine technologies turned that gap into procedure:

• Administrative rationalization (Hollerith-style census tabulators, card catalogs, filing systems, time clocks, Taylorist workflows) redefined value as repeatability and measurement rather than social tact.
• Clinical recording (case histories, standardized nosology, photography, and later X-ray) translated singular displays into classifiable data.
• The clinic itself—and then psychoanalysis as a method—became an apparatus for converting unruly speech into interpretable, teachable protocols.

In short, Freud’s hysterics are the last great figures of a feminine-coded regime that could still make institutions listen by bending desire into spectacle. Their very success helped generate the knowledge that then absorbed them: once desire could be indexed, graphed, and procedurally treated, the prestige shifted to those who operated the rules.

(next: Waves of Women at the Edge of Obsolescence: Profit, Panic, and the Pendulum)