The Clockwork Penguin

Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.

Author: dan

  • Godzilla: King of the Franchises

    If you like what’s going on here at The Clockwork Penguin, if you appreciate the cut of my particular jib, as it were, buy me a coffee!

    A film still from Godzilla vs Kong (2021), featuring Godzilla filling the frame from the torso up. It is raining heavily, so we can't see much detail of Godzilla's face, but we can clearly see blue lightning running along the spines on his back.
    Godzilla with the spicy lightning as depicted in Godzilla vs. Kong (2021).

    The 2014 reboot/continuation/expansion of the Godzilla franchise opens with the standard mystery box. A helicopter flies low over a jungle landscape, there are low minor chords from a rumbling orchestra: dissonance, uncertainty, menace. Helicopter Passenger #1 turns to Helicopter Passenger #2: “They found something.”

    This is the germ of what is now a multi-film franchise, with a spin-off TV series that debuted in late 2023. A few weeks ago, I re-watched Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot, as well as the sequel films I hadn’t seen, Godzilla II: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong.

    It was a bit of fun, obviously, a last hurrah before I went back to the very serious business of media academicking, but as is wont to happen, it’s been stewing ever since. So here: have some little thoughts on big monsters.

    Last week I Masta’d1 up some speculations as to why Argylle has flopped. The first and most obvious reason that a film might tank is that it’s just not a very good film, as this may well be true of Argylle. But in a time where cinema is dead and buried and a media object is never discrete, we can’t look at the film in a vacuum.

    I have thoughts on why #Argylle flopped. I haven’t seen it, so I won’t go into any great depth, but suffice to say there are two major components:

    1) Marvel killed transmedia storytelling, jumped around on the corpse, drove a steamroller over it, then buried it in a nuclear waste facility.

    2) Camp doesn’t hit like it used to. Big ensemble campy treats aren’t as sweet now; in an age of hyper-sensitivity, broad knowledge and information access, they taste a little sour. Ain’t no subtext anymore.2

    The marketing machine behind Argylle decided they’d play a little game, by teasing a novel written by a mystery author (both in terms of them not being well-known, but also an author of actual mystery), with the film being quickly picked up for production. This was fairly clumsily-done, but leaving that to one side: okay, cool idea. The conceit is that the author runs into the real-life equivalent of one of their characters who whisks them away on an adventure. Cue ideas of unreliable narration, possible brainwashing, or whatever, and there’s the neat little package.

    The concept overall is solid, but Universal and Apple made the mistake of thinking they could shoehorn this concept into a campaign that ‘tricked’ the audience into thinking some of it was factual, or at least had some tenuous crossover with reality.

    Basically, they tried an old-school transmedia campaign.

    Transmedia storytelling has always been around in some form or another. It dovetails quite nicely with epistolary and experimental narratives, like Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, and discussions of transmedia also work well when you’re thinking about serial stories or adaptations. The term is most often attributed to Henry Jenkins, a wonderful and kindly elder scholar who was thinking about the huge convergence of media technologies occasioned by the wide adoption of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

    Jenkins’ ur-example of transmedia is The Matrix franchise, “a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium.”3 The idea is that in order to truly appreciate the narrative as a whole, the audience has to follow up on all the elements, be they films, video games, comic books, or whatever.

    “Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption.”4

    This model is now far from unique in terms of marketing or storytelling; with the MCU, DC Universe, the Disneyfied Star Wars universe and others, we have no dearth of complex narratives and storyworlds to choose from. This is maybe now partly why transmedia is seen as, at best, a little dated, old hat, and at worst, a bit of a dirty word, when it comes to narrative, media, or cinema studies. Those still chipping away at the transmedia stoneface are seen as living in the past or worse, wasting their time. I don’t think it’s a waste of time, nor do I necessarily see it as living in the past; it’s just that transmedia is media now.

    Every new media commodity, be it a film, an app, a game, a platform, novel, has a web of attendant media commodities spring up around it. Mostly these are used for marketing, but occasionally these extraneous texts may relay some plot point or narrative element. The issue is that you need to conceit to be front and centre, you need some idea of the full narrative; you can’t expect the audience to want to do anything. The producers of Argylle made this mistake. They did transmedia the old-fashioned way, where narrative elements are spread across discrete media objects (e.g. book and film), and they expected the audience to want to fill in the gaps, and to share their excitement at having done so… on social media, I guess?

    But like transmedia storytelling, social media ain’t what she used to be. Our present internet is fragmented, hyper-platformed, paywalled; city-states competing for dominance, for annexation (acquisition), for citizens or slaves (subscribers). Content is still king, but the patrician’s coffers care not as to whether that content is produced by the finest scribes of the age, or the merchant guild’s new automatons.

    Viral is still viral, popular is still popular, but the propagation of content moves differently. Hashtags, likes, views don’t mean much anymore. You want people talking, but you only care as much as it gets new people to join your platform or your service. Get new citizens inside the gates, then lock and bar the gates behind them; go back to the drawing board for the next big campaign. The long tail is no more; what matters is flash in the pan attention attacks.

    The producers behind the Godzilla reboot clearly envisioned a franchise. This is clear enough from how the film ends (or more accurately, where it stops talking, and the credits are permitted to roll). Godzilla apparently saves the world (or at least Honolulu and Las Vegas) from another giant monster, then disappears into the sea, leaving humanity to speculate as to its motivations.

    It’s also apparent that the filmmakers didn’t want a clean break from the cultural history, themes or value of the broader Godzilla oeuvre; the title sequence suggests that the 1954 Castle Bravo tests were actually an operation to destroy Godzilla5. And in the film’s prologue, this wonderful shot is presented with virtually no context.

    A film still from Godzilla (2014), with a Lego model of the Saturn V rocket in the foreground, and a poster of Godzilla in the background.
    American triumphalism meets Japanese… er, monster promotions?

    What struck me most, though, is the lack of overt story-bridges, particularly in the first film. Story-bridges are parts of the plot, e.g. characters, events, images, that allow the audience to jump off to another part of the narrative. These jumping-off points can be explicit, e.g. an end-credits sequence, or a line of dialogue referring to a past/future event, or they can be implied, e.g. the introduction of a character in a minor role that may participate more prominently in other media.

    As media franchises become more complex, these points/bridges are not as often modelled as connecting branches to nodes around a centred point (a tentpole film, for instance), but as a mesh that connects multiple, interconnected tentpole media. In some of my academic work, with my colleagues Vashanth Selvadurai and Peter Vistisen, we’ve explored how Marvel attempts to balance this complexity:

    “[Marvel] carefully balances production by generating self-contained stories for the mass audience, which include moments of interconnectivity in some scenes to fortify the MCU and thereby accommodate the fan base… [T]he gradual scaling up in bridge complexity from characters to storyworld to a cohesive storyline is integrated into a polycentric universe of individual transmedia products. These elements are not gathered around one tentpole event that the audience has to experience before being able to make sense of the rest.”4

    In Godzilla, the story-bridges are more thematic, even tonal. The story remains consistently about humanity’s desire to control the natural world, and that world’s steadfast resistance to control; multiple times we hear the scientist Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) speak about ‘balance’ in nature, the idea of a natural equilibrium that humanity has upset, and that Godzilla and his kin will restore. There is also a balance within and between humanity; corporate greed, political power struggles, individual freedoms and restrictions, all vie to find a similar kind of equilibrium, if such a thing is possible. The resulting tone is one that feels universal but prescient; topical and relevant to the contemporary moment, despite the presence of enormous monsters.

    This tone is carried over into Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The monsters multiply in this instalment, and an extraterrestrial element is introduced, but in general Godzilla’s animal motivation is about preservation of self, but also of Earth and its biology. I should also note that there are more explicit bridges in this film, like the characters of Dr. Serizawa and his colleague Dr. Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins). But the true connecting thread, at least for me, is this repeated theme of humans and our puny power struggles playing out against the backdrop of a deep time, a history, forces and powers so ancient that we can never really understand them.

    This macro-bridge, if you like, allows the filmmakers to then make tweaks to the micro-elements of the story. If they want or need to adjust the character focus, they can. If the plot of a single film seems a little rote, maybe, or they want to try something different, they’ve given themselves enough space in the story and the story-world to do that. This may not necessarily be intentional, but it certainly appears as an effective counter-model to the MCU/Disney mode, where everything seems over-complicated and planned out in multi-year phases, and everything is so locked in. The MonsterVerse approach is one of ad hoc franchise storytelling, and the result is a universe that feels more free, more open: full of possibilities and untold stories.

    The point of all of this, I suppose, is to let us see what works and what doesn’t. As a storyteller or creative type, it helps me to model and test approaches to storytelling of all scales and budgets, as I think about what kinds of narratives I want to develop, and in which media form. Beyond that, though, I think that as we move into a contentscape that muddles the human-made with the computer-generated, this kind of analysis and discussion is more essential than ever.

    Notes & References

    1. Still working out the vernacular for the new social web. ↩︎
    2. Me, on Mastodon, February 6, 2024. ↩︎
    3. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press, p. 95. ↩︎
    4. Jenkins, Convergence culture, p. 96. ↩︎
    5. The first Godzilla film, directed by Ishirō Honda, was also released in 1954 ↩︎
    6. Selvadurai, V., Vistisen, P., & Binns, D. (2022). Bridge Complexity as a Factor in Audience Interaction in Transmedia Storytelling. Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 7(1), 85–108 (quote from pages 96-7). https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.7.1.0085 ↩︎

  • Swings X Roundabouts

    Remember the good old days of social media, when we’d all sit around laughing at a Good Tweet™? Me either. Actually, that was never a thing. Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.

    Originally I was going to post some condensed form of this to socials, but I thought some may be interested in an extended ramble and/or the workflows involved.

    I deleted my Twitter last year in a mild fit of ethical superiority. I’d been on the platform some 14 years at that point. At first, I delighted in the novelty of microblogging; short little bursts of thought that people could read through, respond to, re-post themselves. But then, as is now de rigueur for all platforms, things changed. Even before Elon took over, the app started tweaking little bits and pieces, changing the way information was presented, prioritised, and delivered. Come the mid-2010s, it just wasn’t the same any more; by that stage, though, so many people that I knew and/or needed to know of, were using the app. It became something I checked weekly, like all my other social network pages, some blogs, etc. One more feed.

    Elon’s takeover, though, seemed like a fitting exit point. Many others felt the same way. I kind of rushed the breakaway, though; I did download all my data, thank the maker, but in terms of flagging the move with people who followed me for various reasons (personal, professional, tracking related declines, etc), I just… didn’t. I set up a Mastodon on the PKM instance, because that was a nice community that I’d found myself in as a positive byproduct of a rather all-encompassing obsession with productivity, life organisation, and information retention/recycling. I’m still on the ‘don (or Masta, per your preference), though I’ve shifted to the main mastodon.social instance to make automation and re-posting easier.

    Anyway, to cut to the quick, I rebooted the ol’ Twitter/X/Elon.com account in the last couple of months just to keep track of people who’ve not yet shifted elsewhere.1 What I didn’t manage to do before I shut it down last year, though, was to export/keep record of those 700 odd people I was following, nor did I just transfer them over to Mastodon, which tools like Movetodon allow you to do pretty seamlessly.

    Thankfully, buried in the data export was a JavaScript file called “following.js”, which contained IDs and URLs for all the Twitter accounts I’d originally followed. Bear in mind, though, not the Twitter usernames, e.g. @NY152 or @Shopgirl, but rather the ID number that Twitter creates as a stable reference for each user. The user IDs and URLs were also surrounded by all the JavaScript guff2 used to display the info in a readable form:

    {
        "following": {
            "accountId": "123456",
            "userLink": "https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=123456"
        }
    },
    {
        "following": {
            "accountId": "789012",
            "userLink": "https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=789012"
        }
    },
    {
        "following": {
            "accountId": "345678",
            "userLink": "https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=345678"
        }
    },

    I have a rudimentary grasp of very basic Python, but JavaScript remains beyond me, so I used the wonderful TextBuddy to remove everything but the URLs, then saved this as a text file. Though string manipulation is a wonderful process, unfortunately the checking of each account remains up to me.

    So whenever I have a spare hour, I’ve been sitting down at the computer and copying and pasting a bunch of URLs into the “Open Multiple URLs” Chrome extension. It’s tedious work, obviously. But it’s been really interesting to see a, who is inactive on Twitter and for how long they’ve been so; b, who’s switched to private since Elon or before; c, who’s moved to Masta or elsewhere; and d, who’s still active and how so. It’s also just a great chance to filter out all the rubbish accounts I followed over those fourteen years!

    In general terms, anyone with any level of tech knowledge or broad online following has shifted almost entirely to different services, maybe leaving up a link or a pinned post to catch any stray visitors. Probably around 40-50% of them are still active in some way; be that sharing work or thoughts with an established audience, or staying in touch with communities.3 Several of the URLs have hit 404s, which means that user has just deleted their X account entirely; good for you, even though I have no idea who you are/were!

    As I develop my thoughts around platforms, algorithms, culture, and so on, reflecting on my own platform use, tech setup, and engagements with data is becoming more than just a hobby; it’s forming a core part of the process. I’ve always struggled to rationalise the counting of my creative work and my personal interests/hobbies with my academic interests. But I think that from now on I just have to accept that there will always be overlap, particularly if I’m to do anything with these ideas, be it write a screenplay or a book, a bunch of blog posts, or anything academical.4

    Notes

    1. I also really like that I locked down the @binnsy username before anyone else got to it; there are plenty of Binnses even just in my family who use that nickname! ↩︎
    2. Guff is the technical term, obviously. ↩︎
    3. This is obviously prevalent in my field of academia, where so many supportive communities have been established over long periods of time, e.g. #PhDchat etc etc. I realised after I deleted my account that even though I don’t participate anywhere near like I used to, these are such valuable spaces when I do log on, and obviously for countless others. You don’t and can’t just throw that shit away. ↩︎
    4. You heard me. ↩︎

  • This algorithmic moment

    Generated by Leonardo AI; prompts by me.

    So much of what I’m being fed at the moment concerns the recent wave of AI. While we are seeing something of a plateauing of the hype cycle, I think (/hope), it’s still very present as an issue, a question, an opportunity, a hope, a fear, a concept. I’ll resist my usual impulse to historicise this last year or two of innovation within the contexts of AI research, which for decades was popularly mocked and institutionally underfunded; I’ll also resist the even stronger impulse to look at AI within the even broader milieu of technology, history, media, and society, which is, apparently, my actual day job.

    What I’ll do instead is drop the phrase algorithmic moment, which is what I’ve been trying to explore, define, and work through over the last 18 months. I’m heading back to work next week after an extended period of leave, so this seems as good a way of any as getting my head back into some of the research I left to one side for a while.

    The algorithmic moment is what we’re in at the moment. It’s the current AI bubble, hype cycle, growth spurt, whatever you define this wave as (some have dubbed it the AI spring or boom, to distinguish it from various AI winters over the last century1). In trying to bracket it off with concrete times, I’ve settled more or less on the emergence of the GPT-3 Beta in 2020. Of course OpenAI and other AI innovations predated this, but it was GPT-3 and its children ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 that really propelled discussions of AI and its possibilities and challenges into the mainstream.

    This also means that much of this moment is swept up with the COVID pandemic. While online life had bled into the real world in interesting ways pre-2020, it was really that year, during urban lockdowns, family zooms, working from home, and a deeply felt global trauma, that online and off felt one and the same. AI innovators capitalised on the moment, seizing capital (financial and cultural) in order to promise a remote revolution built on AI and its now-shunned sibling in discourse, web3 and NFTs.

    How AI plugs into the web as a system is a further consideration — prior to this current boom, AI datasets in research were often closed. But OpenAI and its contemporaries used the internet itself as their dataset. All of humanity’s knowledge, writing, ideas, artistic output, fears, hopes, dreams, scraped and plugged into an algorithm, to then be analysed, searched, filtered, reworked at will by anyone.

    The downfall of FTX and the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried more or less marked the death knell of NFTs as the Next Big Thing, if not web3 as a broader notion to be deployed across open-source, federated applications. And as NFTs slowly left the tech conversation, as that hype cycle started falling, the AI boom filled the void, such that one can hardly log on to a tech news site or half of the most popular Subs-stack without seeing a diatribe or puff piece (not unlike this very blog post) about the latest development.

    ChatGPT has become a hit productivity tool, as well as a boon to students, authors, copy writers and content creators the world over. AI is a headache for many teachers and academics, many of whom fail not only to grasp its actual power and operations, but also how to usefully and constructively implement the technology in class activities and assessment. DALL-E, Midjourney and the like remain controversial phenomena in art and creative communities, where some hail them as invaluable aids, and others debate their ethics and value.

    As with all previous revolutions, the dust will settle on that of AI. The research and innovation will continue as it always has, but out of the limelight and away from the headlines. It feels currently like we cannot keep up, that it’s all happening too fast, that if only we slowed down and thought about things, we could try and understand how we’ll be impacted, how everything might change. At the risk of historicising, exactly like I said I wouldn’t, people thought the same of the printing press, the aeroplane, and the computer. In 2002, Andrew Murphie and John Potts were trying to capture the flux and flow and tension and release of culture and technology. They were grappling in particular with the widespread adoption of the internet, and how to bring that into line with other systems and theories of community and communication. Jean-Francois Lyotard had said that new communications networks functioned largely on “language games” between machines and humans. Building on this idea, Murphie and Potts suggested that the information economy “needs us to make unexpected ‘moves’ in these games or it will wind down through a kind of natural attrition. [The information economy] feeds on new patterns and in the process sets up a kind of freedom of movement within it in order to gain access to the new.”2

    The information economy has given way, now, to the platform economy. It might be easy, then, to think that the internet is dead and decaying or, at least, kind of withering or atrophying. Similarly, it can be even easier to think that in this locked-down, walled-off, platform- and app-based existence where online and offline are more or less congruent, we are without control. I’ve been dropping breadcrumbs over these last few posts as to how we might resist in some small way, if not to the detriment of the system, then at least to the benefit of our own mental states; and I hope to keep doing this in future posts (and over on Mastodon).

    For me, the above thoughts have been gestating for a long time, but they remain immature, unpolished; unfiltered which, in its own way, is a form of resistance to the popular image of the opaque black box of algorithmic systems. I am still trying to figure out what to do with them; whether to develop them further into a series of academic articles or a monograph, to just keep posting random bits and bobs here on this site, or to seed them into a creative piece, be it a film, book, or something else entirely. Maybe a little of everything, but I’m in no rush.

    As a postscript, I’m also publishing this here to resist another system, that of academic publishing, which is monolithic, glacial, frustrating, and usually hidden behind a paywall for a privileged few. Anyway, I’m not expecting anyone to read this, much less use or cite it in their work, but better it be here if someone needs it than reserved for a privileged few.

    As a bookend for the AI-generated image that opened the post, I asked Bard for “a cool sign-off for my blog posts about technology, history, and culture” and it offered the following, so here you go…

    Signing off before the robots take over. (Just kidding… maybe.)

    Notes

    1. For an excellent history of AI up to around 1990, I can’t recommend enough AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence by Daniel Crevier. Crevier has made the book available for download via ResearchGate. ↩︎
    2. Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts. 2003. Culture and Technology. London: Macmillan Education UK, p. 208. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08938-0. ↩︎

  • Push the button for a sweet treat

    I had grand plans of posting something about Godzilla today, but that will have to wait for these delightful rats. These tiny furry folx learned to associate pushing a little button with getting a sugar treat. As time progressed, though, they ended up just pushing the button for fun.

    The results are about as delightful as you’d expect.

    The project was led by French photographer Augustin Lignier, whose work explores the technography and performativity of photography. I came across the work due to the mighty Kottke, who quotes a New York Times piece where Lignier considers that the rats’ continued button-mashing as a neat analog for our addiction to social media.

    As platforms morph, shrink, converge, collapse all over the internet, one begins to wonder what the web of the imminent future might look like. While I did mention grassroots movements and community-run services like Neocities in my last post, the network effects that platforms like Substack, X, hell, even WordPress right here, can offer, are often more tempting than a cutesy throwback. That is to say nothing of the ease with which said platforms integrate with other services to maximise attention on their users.

    Substack and X are feeling the squeeze of the real world to greater and lesser degrees; the former as a safe space for Nazis, the latter as a haven for AI-generated deepfakes. But where one platform collapses, another will happily take its place, unless we all decide to opt out together.

    The internet of the future will be several interweaved different platforms, modes, nodes, devices, personalities, and communities. In a way it has always been so, but with its sheer ubiquity, the way it layers over and enfolds so many aspects of existence, thinking ‘the internet’ (or even ‘the Internet’, as autocorrect seemed to cling to forever) as a monolith is now a waste of time.

  • The handmade internet

    A fragment from random notes over the last few days, weeks…

    There seems to be a return to an idea, philosophy, or practice of “just make stuff!” or “just do it!”; “just write something, ffs!” (Maybe that last one is more for me…)

    I noticed this most recently with Rick Rubin’s odd but intriguing Squarespace tie-in promo for his book; he’s seeking to spawn or to gather online folx who are just doing cool, interesting, intriguing stuff. At least that’s how I saw it in my cursory glance over the copy:

    A collaboration with Rick Rubin to build tetragrammaton – an online world of curated materials – and a new website design, Transmission, to inspire your creativity.

    From “Co _ Rick Rubin“, Squarespace, accessed January 22, 2024 (archived).

    It’s all a bit corporate, a bit woowoo, a bit odd, but it plugs into a broader conversation about how the internet has evolved and changed, how platforms have scorched much of the landscape that was previously a bit rougher around the edges, a bit more grassroots, more personal, more creative, perhaps.

    There are other offshoots of this movement, like tiny-internets, and lovely lite micro-blogging services like bearblog and Plume, even Neocities. Larger companies like Automattic, for all their faults, are (at least at a surface, front facing level), trying to champion this kind of crazy, personalised, creative internet.

    Whether this is a return to the internet of old, or a new evolution entirely, remains to be seen.