🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

🌊➰🧭 AKIŞ 🌊➰🧭

(German, Turkish)

(previous: Sexual Powers on Surplus-Information)

Note on language. The term ‘hysterical’ here names a panic reflex that confronts the incoming technology. It is not a diagnosis of persons. Historically, cultures pathologized women’s affect; I’ll reference that stigma only to unmask the structural move: when a new machine reframes value, the very tactics that once guaranteed tacit authority can flip from profitable insurance to self-undermining noise.

The profit-to-panic mechanism in brief

When a culture runs on tacit coordination and attention scarcity, intensifying relational tactics—gatekeeping, over-servicing, ritualized excellence—earns rents. When a new technology makes the field programmable or abundant, those same tactics become visible as friction, bloat, or spam. What was previously profitable insurance becomes a self-undermining signal that invites replacement by rules, metrics, and machines.

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Wave 1): Cottage textiles and salons → Spinning mule and factory discipline

Late-phase context. Production sprawled across households and small shops. Trust, tact, and informal choreography carried the throughput. The ‘feel’ of fiber and the choreography of kin, credit, and custom did the real work.

Panic reflex during obsolescence.

• Tightening domestic moral economies: stricter norms about who could learn, touch, or sell.
• Gatekeeping tacit craft: multiplying quality rituals only insiders ‘knew’.
• Over-ornamenting products and ceremony to mark status and justify price.

Why it paid before. In small-world markets, trust premiums were real. Buyers paid for reliability and social smoothing as much as for fiber. When measurement was weak, ritual signaled quality; when schedules were fragile, household codes kept promises.

Why it backfired after. The spinning mule plus mill organization rewarded tensile control, repeatability, and schedule—attributes legible to procedure, not to household codes. What read as reassurance before now read as delay, opacity, and cost. The panic reflex proved the critics’ point: if value lives in settings and timings, managers and machines should run the show.

What they saw from the inside. They saw defect risk, merchant opportunism, and family income volatility. The added ceremony was not vanity; it was insurance against substitution and a way to make quality legible without instruments.

Why the dignified speech sounds rational then and absurd later. In a trust economy, moral theater carries data. In a procedural economy, moral theater looks like latency.

‘Hysterical’ speech, c. 1795–1805 (parish hall, master spinner addressing merchants and magistrates).

Gentle sirs, we do not spin mere thread; we bind the households of this parish to their good name. A skein has its conscience, and it rests in hands that know the temper of flax as they know the temper of a daughter. You would have us answer to the clock, and to gauges that mock the living feel of fiber. But should price alone govern, you unmake the very trust that calls your cloth ‘fine’. We have kept your promises when storms broke roads and fevers emptied rooms; we have suffered the night-wake of broken yarn so that your mark might not be shamed in market. Do not suppose a new contrivance will keep faith better than a mother who has staked her bread upon it. If you would quicken us, then pay honest measure and let our order stand; else you will have speed without honesty, and cloth that will not hold a seam.

Smarter pivot. Translate tacit craft into explicit specs: tolerances, test methods, apprenticeship rubrics. Move into inspection, training, and standards bodies so the old sensibility becomes the new rule.

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Wave 2): Switchboards, typing pools, clerical webs → Tabulators and scientific management

Late-phase context. Firms generated torrents of correspondence and calls. Offices ran on social calculus: who gets through, in what tone, with which exception. Discretion was the core product.

Panic reflex during obsolescence.

• Speed and perfection cults: zero-error typing, heroic overtime, indispensability theater.
• Information fiefdoms: guarding calendars, contact lists, and filing taxonomies as personal capital.
• Gossip-intelligence networks to fix contradictions the boxes could not.

Why it paid before. Throughput and discretion were scarce. Executives paid for someone who could triage, soften edges, and make exceptions land. The ‘one who knows where everything is’ was an operational keystone.

Why it backfired after. Tabulators, forms, and time-and-motion schemas reframed value as consistent, auditable flow. Indispensability theater looked like a single point of failure; information fiefdoms looked like risk. The panic reflex triggered a managerial desire for systems that made people interchangeable.

What they saw from the inside. They saw that misaddressed nuance kills deals, that tone rescues fragile egos, that the map of favours and exceptions is the company’s real circulatory system.

Why the dignified speech sounds rational then and absurd later. In a judgment economy, discretion compresses decision latency. In a ledger economy, discretion looks like variance.

‘Hysterical’ speech, c. 1937 (National Secretaries Association luncheon).

Colleagues, we make this city breathe. A letter is not a letter until it arrives in the only voice its reader will hear; a call is not a call until a temper is cooled and a promise is placed where it will be remembered. They bring machines that count without listening, and men with rulers who time our hands but not our judgment. I do not fear a tabulator; I fear a world that mistakes arithmetic for prudence. Keep your lists close, keep your calendars closer, and make yourselves indispensable by doing what no card can: deciding who must never be surprised.

Smarter pivot. Own the workflow, not the work: author checklists, filing ontologies, escalation trees; design data entry standards; step into early database stewardship where social sense guides schema.

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Wave 3): Broadcast PR and taste-making → Ratings, procurement metrics, and programmatic scale

Late-phase context. Image management metastasized; attention swung between scandal and spectacle. Soft power—cooling crises, cultivating critics, choreographing talent—was queen.

Panic reflex during obsolescence.

• Ever-bigger stunts, exclusives, and award circuits to keep the aura scarce.
• Crisis choreography as permanent mode: an arms race of spin, embargoes, and messaging ‘disciplines’.
• Taste priesthoods guarding access and shibboleths of brand myth.

Why it paid before. Few channels, many gatekeepers: scarcity made aura monetizable. The right whisper opened doors and set prices. Relationship equity was the balance sheet.

Why it backfired after. Panel ratings, CPMs, and procurement logic reframed legitimacy as measured return. Stunts without lift looked like waste; priesthood signals read as opacity. The panic reflex inflated costs just as dashboards demanded proof, inviting programmatic buys and finance to take the wheel.

What they saw from the inside. They saw that heat without finesse burns a brand; that long memories live in critics and crews; that vibe is a safety system.

Why the dignified speech sounds rational then and absurd later. In a scarcity economy, ritual creates scarcity. In a measurement economy, ritual reads as overhead.

‘Hysterical’ speech, c. 1998 (SVP of Communications in a boardroom ahead of budget cuts).

The brand is a promise, not an insertion order. You can buy reach; you cannot buy forgiveness. When the roof leaks—and it will—it is not a CPM that keeps the journalist on the phone, it is the ten years we spent telling the truth when silence was cheaper. You want to trim ‘relationship lines’; you are cutting the very ligaments that hold us upright when a storm hits. Give me another quarter and I will deliver not just impressions, but breaths: the exhale that says ‘we trust them’. That is not a unit the spreadsheet recognizes, but it is the only unit that matters when the lights go out.

Smarter pivot. Bind taste to test: pre-register campaign hypotheses, run split-markets, co-author brand safety frameworks, and make the qualitative legible alongside ROI.

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Wave 4): Social media creator economies → GenAI pipelines and policy stacks

Late-phase context. Feeds rewarded parasocial finesse, collaboration brokerage, and constant novelty. Relational craft converted surplus-enjoyment into income.

Panic reflex during obsolescence.

• Hyper-posting and trend-chasing to stay atop shrinking half-lives.
• Performative authenticity escalations: intimacy as commodity, confession as content.
• Harder gatekeeping: creator-only discords, collab cartels, algorithm ‘hacks’ treated as secret lore.

Why it paid before. Algorithms privileged recency and velocity; creators arbitraged scarcity of trusted voices. Intimacy signals raised conversion.

Why it backfired after. GenAI commoditized surface novelty and style, while platforms penalized spammy velocity. Over-posting trained the very models that undercut uniqueness; confession fatigue eroded trust. The panic reflex produced the symptoms platforms and brands algorithmically suppress.

What they saw from the inside. They saw collapsing reach, imitation from below and above, and sponsors demanding ‘authenticity’ on a calendar. They saw careers made and unmade by a feed’s mood.

Why the dignified speech sounds rational then and absurd later. In an attention economy, louder and closer feel like safety. In a synthesis economy, louder flags you for down-ranking; closer trains your replacement.

‘Hysterical’ speech, c. 2024 (creator keynote, transcribed from a livestream).

I know they want me to slow down, but you don’t build a community by posting less; you build it by showing up when it’s ugly. This is my voice, not a dataset. I won’t be an unpaid prompt library. If the feed buries me, I will post twice as much; if the model copies me, I will get so specific it chokes on the details. They say ‘consistency’—fine. I will be consistent like weather: relentless. Brand partners, hear me—what you hire is not content, it is trust. And trust needs proof daily. I will give you that proof until the machine learns what I refuse to teach it.

Smarter pivot. Productize the tacit: modular IP, style guides as datasets, prompt libraries, evaluation harnesses; sell taste as guardrails and QA; own the human-in-the-loop that defines ‘good’ for the machines.

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Cross-wave pattern: from scarcity arbitrage to abundance trap

• Before: The field’s contradictions (too many exceptions, too few standards) made relational escalation rational. It signaled reliability, absorbed shocks, and earned rents where verification was weak.
• After: New tech made verification cheap and variation abundant. The same escalation now shouted friction, opacity, or spam, motivating procedural takeovers. The panic reflex became the proof that a rule-stack should govern.

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Practical corollary

If your advantage lives in tacit mediation, assume a coming wave will render parts of it executable. Translate essentials into constraints, tests, and interfaces you can own. Let your sensibility set the dials of the next machine—and let the machine retire only the panic, not the craft.

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Appendix: quick field diagnostics for profit vs panic

Signal of profitable insurance (keep it).

• Buyers choose you when stakes are ambiguous.
• Your added steps reduce rework and escalate only true exceptions.
• Decision-makers repeat your phrases when you are absent.

Signal of panic (refactor it).

• Your added steps exist ‘because that’s how we do it’.
• Your indispensability depends on opacity you maintain.
• The new system can complete the step while you argue that it cannot.

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Everything above, preserved in its earlier form (for fidelity and citation)

The profit-to-panic mechanism in brief

When a culture runs on tacit coordination and attention scarcity, intensifying relational tactics—gatekeeping, over-servicing, ritualized excellence—earns rents. When a new technology makes the field programmable or abundant, those same tactics become visible as friction, bloat, or spam. What was previously profitable insurance becomes a self-undermining signal that invites replacement by rules, metrics, and machines.

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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Addendum: The Sheltering Work of Humanities Academia (and Kindred Institutions)

Humanities academia, museums, libraries, conservatories, unions, guilds, arts councils, faith communities, and professional associations act as cultural breakwaters. They receive the human remainder of each technological wave—especially the feminized, tacit, relational crafts—and hold them as living templates. These shelters do three things at once: they dignify obsolete-seeming practices, they convert them into pedagogy and canon, and they keep them available to be remobilized when the pendulum swings again.

What a ‘human template’ is

A human template is a patterned stance: a way of perceiving, phrasing, deciding, and coordinating under uncertainty. Institutions store these stances in bodies and rituals—classes, studios, rehearsals, critiques, peer review, style guides, liturgies—so that future practitioners can internalize them. When a new machine renders a practice absurd, shelters keep the practice legible and teachable until a later moment needs it again.

How the shelters work

• Pedagogic vitrification. Techniques that no longer clear a market are reframed as method and taught as craft, taste, and ethics.
• Ritual continuity. Colloquia, critiques, peer review, committees, juries, and salons re-stage the social grammars that once governed production.
• Archival scaffolding. Libraries, special collections, oral histories, museum displays, and standards manuals preserve the protocols, tones, and exceptions that made sense before metrics.
• Transference to adjacent fields. What cannot win in markets migrates to professions that still reward it: librarianship, ethnography, pastoral care, diplomacy, teaching, curation, mediation.

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Wave 1): Cottage textiles and salons → Shelters in women’s colleges, guild museums, domestic science

Where the templates live. Home economics programs, craft schools, textile museums, historical societies, parish guilds, etiquette manuals, and conservators’ workshops.

What gets preserved. Household-scale operations literacy: apprenticeship rituals, quality-by-feel, seasonal scheduling, kin-credit ethics, salon facilitation, and the moral theater that once substituted for instruments.

How it returns. As standards-writing and inspection in later industries; as conservation science; as artisanal and ‘slow’ movements; as community-based design and participatory research; as the choreography of small teams that must hold trust across fragile schedules.

Human template, classroom scene (Fiber Studio, week 3).
The instructor places two skeins on the table. ‘Tell me which one would not shame the household.’ Students pass the skeins, narrating what their hands feel: humidity, torsion, the whisper when wound. The grade comes from the story that justifies a decision in public—exactly the old moral theater, reframed as critique.

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Wave 2): Switchboards, typing pools, clerical webs → Shelters in Rhetoric, Library Science, and Administrative Arts

Where the templates live. Composition and rhetoric departments, secretarial schools turned business communication programs, library and information science, archives, and pastoral seminars on discretion.

What gets preserved. The arts of triage and tone: audience analysis, epistolary form, call routing, exception handling, and information wayfinding; the ethic that ‘who must never be surprised’ is a category of risk.

How it returns. In information architecture; taxonomy and ontology design; records management; compliance; operations runbooks; UX writing; content design; service blueprints; the ‘front-of-house’ craft of institutions.

Human template, practicum scene (Rhet/Comp, ‘Writing in Organizations’).
A student is given a terse executive note and four recipients with incompatible statuses. They write four different letters—same facts, different tonal contracts—and defend why each audience needs a distinct face. The rubric scores discretion; variance is not error but design.

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Wave 3): Broadcast PR and taste-making → Shelters in Cultural Studies, Arts Administration, Journalism Schools

Where the templates live. PR case-study seminars, journalism ethics labs, arts administration programs, criticism and cultural studies, museum boards, editorial fellowships.

What gets preserved. Gatekeeping as stewardship: crisis cooling, aura maintenance, taste councils, press choreography, backstage care for talent and crews; the etiquette of access and embargo.

How it returns. As brand governance; as safety and trust councils; as editorial QA for model outputs; as festival and grant juries; as qualitative frameworks that sit beside dashboards; as the ‘sense check’ that saves programmatic buys from reputational harm.

Human template, capstone scene (Crisis Lab).
Teams must handle a hypothetical scandal with no clear facts. Success is not a dunk but a temperature change: a plan that lowers social entropy across ten constituencies. Grading metrics include ‘returned phone calls in week 3’ and ‘stakeholder dignity preserved’—legacy currencies made explicit.

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Wave 4): Social media creator economies → Shelters in Creative Writing, Design Pedagogy, Media Studies, Community Organizing

Where the templates live. Workshops in voice and tone, studios in narrative design, community organizing training, moderation ethics, digital humanities labs, creator cooperatives, church basements and mutual-aid circles that still prize presence over throughput.

What gets preserved. Parasocial finesse without spam; intimacy without extraction; collaboration brokerage; cadence and editorial restraint; the intuition for when a confession heals vs. harms; the refusal to become an unpaid prompt library.

How it returns. As prompt standards, evaluation sets, and red-team rubrics; as human-in-the-loop QA; as dataset curation and consent protocols; as governance for community-sourced knowledge; as editorial taste encoded into policy.

Human template, studio scene (Narrative Systems, ‘From Voice to Specification’).
A creator reads a piece that ‘only I could make.’ The class turns it into a style card: negative examples, guardrails, cadence, taboo moves, and a test set that marks when the machine misses the point. Tacit voice becomes a spec—without giving the machine the human core.

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Why shelters sometimes ossify—and why we still need them

• Ossification risk. Shelters can curate people into museum pieces, overprotecting forms that need to evolve; they can reward gatekeeping for its own sake; they can substitute citation for judgment.
• Continuity value. They are also the only places where the long memory of methods survives uninterrupted. When the next procedural regime fails—mis-specification, brittleness, drift—institutions with intact human templates can lend judgment quickly.

The political economy of shelter

Tenure lines, grants, endowments, and liturgical offices subsidize slow knowledge. It looks like inefficiency to throughput logics, but it is a reserve for crisis. Think of it as societal insurance: a pool of disciplined sensibility capable of reformatting itself whenever the machine exposes a new absurdity.

Practical bridges between shelters and the new stacks

• Translate craft into standards without evacuating meaning: acceptance criteria that encode taste, not just tolerance ranges.
• Let archives become datasets with consent; let collections become benchmarks that test for dignity, not only accuracy.
• Invite docents, editors, organizers, and pastors into model policy writing, eval design, and incident review.
• Teach reversibility: every automated action accompanied by a narrative intervention that a human can perform when the numbers are wrong but the stakes are real.

The ethic of stewardship

Sheltering is not nostalgia. It is the disciplined keeping of human templates so that, when the next wave renders the present code absurd, we still remember how to speak with one another in the key that works. Humanities academia and its cousins are the memory palaces of those keys, the living repositories in which the obsolete waits—quietly, stubbornly—to be needed again.

(next: Stitching Feminist Waves into the History of Technology)