Access, Not Convenience
Or: Meet DJ Key Crank
Edited by nadav, Peewee Hermeneutics, and Alex McDonough. Their assistance was essential and they have my gratitude. Special thanks are also due to jane madden, whose recent output helped inspire this piece.
What year did your parents stop being able to reliably operate their own television? My parents can still work their TV just fine (I think), but as a younger person it’s just assumed I can work it better by default. Even then, I’m occasionally mystified. My father and I are both proponents of the digital TV antenna ($20 at Best Buy, you will not regret it) but some gremlins in the software invariably make their TV fail to remember that it can access the antenna channels. It’s become a Thanksgiving morning ritual. Dad asks me to make sure we’re set up for football, I throw on the Live TV input and wade through thousands upon thousands of free digital channels showing Hallmark movies, cooking shows, Gunsmoke reruns, Best Latino Hot Hits Party Beats, until through some intuitive process I’m greeted with the smiling faces of the alcoholics and serial philanderers that commentate on NFL games.
The analog CRT-TV gives way to the digital flatscreen gives way to the smart TV with its app menu interface until one night your mom, or dad, or grandma, or grandpa, who just wants to watch 60 Minutes or Sunday Night Football, calls you up asking if you can come over and fix the TV because they don’t know how you make it show the TV channels anymore.
This level of complication feels malicious.
Many of our modern afflictions are attributed to a love of convenience. People run up credit card or Klarna debt because it’s more convenient to DoorDash every meal rather than driving to pick it up yourself or cooking at home. Movie theaters go bankrupt because waiting for a streaming release and then watching at home is more convenient. Children and adolescents socialize through digital playgrounds like Roblox or Fortnite because it’s more convenient than seeing each other in person. It’s such a quintessentially American diagnosis of a macro-level social problem, wherein the issue begins and ends with the weakness of the individual. Why are you DoorDashing Nashville hot chicken instead of meal-prepping high-protein power bowls as seen on YouTube Shorts? Why are you consuming streaming entertainment instead of reading Marcus Aurelius or The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck or some other viral thought-system of the month which will improve your virtue and productivity? Why are the children playing their video games instead of attending cram school? Do they want to lose to China? Truly the west has fallen and billions must die.
But surely that doesn’t add up? If convenience were the end goal, the level of complication we observe all around us, growing denser and more hostile all the time, wouldn’t exist. There wouldn’t be apps for your laundry, apps for your coffee mug, apps to use your bed. There wouldn’t be seven separate streaming services where the football game you’d like to watch could potentially be hiding. Google search wouldn’t be progressively crippling itself further with each new update. If convenience were the end goal, your parents would still be able to use their television.
The goal, I argue, is not and never has been convenience. The goal is access.
To define what I mean by “access” let’s revisit our allegedly convenience-loving friends from a few paragraphs ago. Now, allow me to manage our collective expectations and say that it would be irresponsible to absolve the public with broad brush strokes. In life, we encounter the oppressed and depressed as well as the indolent, lazy, contrarian, and otherwise insufferable. A well-meaning admonishment of the Klarna debtor class to buy a few nonstick pans and plastic spatulas and cook something at home at least a few times a week may be met with the time-honored internet tradition of sudden and committed vitriol, free-associating a bouquet of larger social and historical forces to explain why it’s actually deeply offensive to suggest you modify your behavior in any way. Suggesting I get a rice cooker at a thrift shop and make my own Chipotle bowls is appropriating east Asian culture, or something. It’s problematic to cook when Current Political Thing is happening, and also my Morgellons is acting up, and so on and so forth.
So yes, perhaps we really are a nation of three hundred million callers into the Dave Ramsey program, explaining that we really did need to lease that Ford Raptor and buy those fifty yard line tickets to the Cowboys game even though our homes, cars, and kneecaps are due to be repossessed any day now.
However, consider my hypothesis: access, not convenience.
Is the habitual DoorDash orderer a slave to convenience? Or do they have no other means to access a daily reward for their efforts? Do you put up with the onerous fees and kabuki theater of taking delivery because you’re lazy, or because you really do need the birria tacos to convince yourself that the day’s toil was in any sense worthwhile? Are the streaming entertainment power-users simply Wall-E-esque adult babies in their trendy loungewear, disconnected from the sublime community of the cinema? Or are they simply looking to get their money’s worth? We pay monthly to access vast vaults of video entertainment across dozens of genres, the individual user will never watch the majority of what they pay for and, subconsciously, I feel we are aware of this. Therefore it makes financial sense that we use what we already pay for to access the few things on offer that we actually do want to watch. Are the children so enraptured by Roblox and Fortnite because the nefarious pied pipers that craft these digital playgrounds have dopamine-hacked our youth? Or is it just exponentially simpler to check your group chats and hop online with your pals, rather than going through the parental making of calls, checking of schedules, and begging-for of rides, to access your friends in person? Social trends have moved children away from unstructured play in public spaces (public space in America being a nebulous concept at best) and design trends in both urban development and automotive design have made the current generation of first time parents hyper-aware of the risk that their little bundle of joy incurs just crossing the street to a neighbor’s yard. Nobody wants to be the parent being harangued in a court hearing about alleged negligence after little Braxton was turned into cat food at forty miles an hour by a guy off a Zyn and a Celcius trying to cook a parlay from the driver’s seat of his Ford Raptor. Perhaps it’s best if you discuss skibidi rizz and six seven with Ranger, Maverick, and Taxler on your Roblox. Plenty of time to leave the house once you’re licensed to drive. That’s the best way to access public space, after all.
The thing about convenience is that it generally implies a premium paid to save effort. There’s a transactional aspect, but it’s transient and transparent. Take, for instance, valet parking. You can find this as a premium service at many hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs, it removes the headache of parking your own car for a nominal fee plus tip. You feel like a big shot. You get your car brought to you on the way out. Convenient!
Access is not convenience because access is inherently a two-way street. We cannot access without opening ourselves up to be accessed. Behind the flat lettermarks and non-threatening branding of modern tech companies lie vast cubicle mazes populated by greasy flesh and prying eyes. The unaccountable, unknowable, archons of access, the hidden figures in the architecture of our screen reality. To make use of any of these modern “conveniences” requires our consent to this mutual continuum of access. Doordash needs the address and the credit card on file. The streaming service needs the right to monitor our viewing preferences so their internal algorithms can recommend new content to us. Roblox, or any other online gaming platform, requires our assent to dense and impenetrable terms of service. I’m now reminded of one of my favorite visual gags on The Simpsons. While taking a tour of the Duff Beer Brewery, Homer is shown three vats housing Duff, Duff Lite, and the brewery’s newest product, Duff Dry. A widening of the frame reveals that all three of the vats are being fed by the same tube, split into three ends. These things, these matrices of access, come in a wide variety of masks, but fundamentally they all reach the same end. There are no software companies, there are no gig work apps, there are no entertainment conglomerates, there is no big tech, just big data. Big data is just another way to say we, the people.
Data is like money, it can do a functionally infinite number of things and it knows no master. Therefore it follows that the primary aggregators, cleaners, and salesmen of data are like banks. The deepening complication and convolution of our modern tech-symbiote existence can be thought of as a land rush for data, with institutional and independent operators waging a perpetual and asymmetric struggle for the new currency. He who controls the data controls the universe.
This is, by now, a well-trod beat. Writers like Jacob Silverman, Cory Doctorow, Charlie Warzel, and Shoshana Zuboff have created extensive bodies of work tracing the architecture of our Access Economy. In the face of the canon of essays, interviews, books, and blogs created by these professional journalists, the back-of-the-envelope Big Data 101 rant published by a humble amateur such as myself can only serve to bore, confuse, or (heaven forbid) misinform you. What I’d like to do instead is call your attention to a phenomenon I see downstream of the Access Economy, one that I feel somewhat uniquely qualified to highlight and explain as an online weirdo. When data is currency and big data concerns are banks, then that means information must be financialized. We standardize the info-unit, the meme, to borrow a concept from Richard Dawkins, and therefore commodify it. We create, therefore, a class of commodity broker to which every standard info-unit is of equal concern.
I would like to introduce you all to DJ Key Crank.
This is DJ Key Crank, there are many accounts like his but this one is the one I found first. He’s been on hiatus since late last year, I think his original account got banned and I mourn its passing daily. However, many of his best posts have been saved for posterity by my friends and I. I began flooding our chat with these in early 2024 and they were an instant hit, this sort of 5-in-1 shower gel approach to news and current events produces a certain comedic uncanny valley effect which I find charming.
Crank and his contemporaries feel like the natural evolution of something like the Jerry Springer Show. A kind of crowdsourcing of the same ugly urges to gawk, judge, and punch down that once drove things like carnival freak shows. As in many other industries, the advent of the internet has led to the traditional Freak seeing their labor devalued. Why pay a freak when any of us could become one overnight? One video clip or social media post could see any of us pressed into service under the world-spanning bigtop of the internet, changed from audience to performer with no guarantee of a return to our original condition. The pernicious thing about the Access Economy is that it’s passive until it turns invasive with sudden and all-encompassing violence. A newly-minted Internet Freak will wake up on the day they become public property with no knowledge that their life is about to change. Perhaps it’s a good kind of change, a few heady weeks until you can hire a publicist and start a podcast. All too often, though, it’s the kind of change that ends with angry people calling your place of employment and posting your address on public forums, in the hopes that someone will arrive at your front door and, ahem, access you.
The branding of this sort of content as “hood news” comes with a whole bouquet of racist connotations. It’s a buffet style serving of the American public’s ugliest urges, to scorn the vulnerable, “deviant,” freakish, and, naturally, the nonwhite. Crank is hardly the first such person (or persons) to gain attention and at least a little money from tapping into these urges, and I’d still call Crank morally superior to, say, Don Imus, Morton Downey Jr. or Keemstar. If anything the relative non-involvement of Crank is more interesting to me than the out-front egoism of the traditional shock jock, trash TV host, or drama streamer/vlogger. He’s an online lifeform shaped by the evolutionary environment and action/reward incentives of a world constructed to enable maximum access to some novel piece of information at all times. The “why,” the “how,” and often the “who” have been discarded in the name of efficiency. Something new has always dropped and we need to access it. Not understand it, just perceive it.
The really fascinating thing, though, is that the above posts swim in the same stream, and take up the same amount of space as this:
This, to me, is where the commodification of information takes us. It’s a flattening of tone, of priority, of meaning. A war between sovereign states that could potentially kill tens of thousands in active combat and affect the lives of millions throughout the world is no less or more important than 2010 Facebook/Tumblr platitudes about relationship troubles and fake friends, influencer beefs, bizarro human interest news stories, or simply somebody “going viral.” The tone and tenor of DJ Key Crank is reflective of the pervasive mood of the Internet in the 2020s. Success comes through the reduction of all information down to one default emotion: a low-ebb hype. Information arrives like hits from a vape pen, soliciting canned reactions that send the correct signals but maintain the customary ironic distance. Friend sends good thing, react with laughing emoji, reply: “Let’s gooooo.” Friend sends bad thing, no emoji reaction, reply: “Bro this sucks.” This low-ebb tonal uniformity makes information scrollable, extracting user data by the millisecond and the microinput as you keep the app open. When we gaze into the digital abyss, the abyss gazes also into us.1
In the Access Economy, it’s only logical that we should proceed this way. Why should any of these stories matter more than any of the other ones? They all take up the same units of data, of attention. They all “weigh” one post, and posts are how we access the news, which means they are, in turn, how the news accesses us. The great crisis of my youth was sparked by bigness in the financial sector sun amok, indulged and engorged until at last it became “too big to fail.” I fear that the great crisis of my adulthood may ensue when data, information, becomes too big, too ubiquitous, too accessible, for any of it to have real meaning, texture, context, or permanence. What happens when data becomes too big to contain meaning? We may live to know the answer.
Alex McDonough wrote a few of these sentences and I’d feel icky not acknowledging that.
This was perfect Klaus. 10/10.
And to answer your question: “What happens when data becomes too big to contain meaning?”…when a dataset enough variables (each can be treated as a mathematical dimension), we will encounter a real life application of The Curse of Dimensionality, in which every point in space has extreme mathematical distance from each other such that each point is an outlier. In the human context, all of us will become so alienated and unique yet we’ll all feel boring to each other.
(PS: Thanks for the shoutout!)
Thank you Klaus. And Alex.