What does Slime have to do with Colonialism with Christine Goding-Doty

In this episode, I sit down with Christine Goding-Doty, Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York. What begins with oddly satisfying videos quickly opens into a deeper conversation about how digital media shapes what we feel, notice, and value. Christine studies race, the internet, and digital media through the lens of colonialism. Her current work looks at how online aesthetics, from smooth interfaces to the squish of slime, shape our habits and desires in ways we rarely question. Together, they trace the rise of oddly satisfying content from early Reddit threads to today’s slime economy and AI-generated videos. Along the way, they explore the hidden labour behind content, the environmental cost of slime, why ASMR affects some people and not others, and how “bad” audio became part of the internet’s visual and sensory language. This is a conversation about images, desire, and the systems quietly shaping how we experience the online world.

Tom Trevatt Christine, really nice to see you again. We've been friends for probably a decade now. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for joining us. Of course, of course. Thank you very much for coming. You're speaking to us from New York. But why don't you tell the people who don't know you who you are, what you do, and what your kind of interests are in the world?

Christine Goding-Doty Thank you for having me.

Sure. So I'm Christine Goding-Doty. I'm an assistant professor in culture and media at the New School, where I work on a range of questions, but mostly they have to do with race, the internet, and our digital world, and how we might use the digital world or digital media to rethink race and colonialism, and then also how new problems find some sort of expression online.

Tom Trevatt Nice. And so you're teaching at the moment. You've just started a new semester. You were telling me just before we got on air. Who are your students? What are their interests? What do they want to learn from you?

Christine Goding-Doty My students, actually I have a very wide range of students. Because I'm at the New School, we have a lot of Parson students who take classes at my division, which is the undergraduate college, Eugene Lang. And actually I have quite a number of students who are doing a combined Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Fine Arts. So in my classes, they come to get a kind of theoretical background for their research.

But outside of my class, know, like when my students check in, sometimes they say like, I spent all day yesterday sewing, you know, or like they have these very, very long studio classes. Lots of them are doing visual culture, making art. I had one student last year who was telling us throughout the semester about the accessories that he's making. Like in his particular program, his main work is to design a collection of accessories.

So I have some students who are just liberal arts students. They're doing a sort of straightforward bachelor of arts degree. Sometimes they're actually from my department, culture and media. And they're like film students, things like that. But I do have quite a number of design students who are probably hoping to become you one day.

Sure.

Yeah, I mean, I'm actually, just right now writing a letter of recommendation for one of my students to do an internship at the Smithsonian and most of what she does is photography. Yeah.

Tom Trevatt Amazing. What about your background? You obviously are, you know, you're based in New York at the moment, you lived in New York before, but you've been kind of around working in different universities before. So what led you to the new school?

Christine Goding-Doty It was a long winding path. So I'm from New York originally. And I think New York gives you a certain kind of city pride, we could say. You could call it a chauvinism about cities. That gave me a kind of goal when I went to grad school in Chicago that I would one day return to New York. So coming back to New York to be near my family and just to be in this city in particular was a long-term goal. But the path was first grad school in Chicago at Northwestern. I did African-American studies. And then my first job was at University of Wisconsin-Madison. And it was like, by then I had already incorporated studying digital media into my world. And so I bounced around from a lot of different departments. I was in English there. Then I was at Hobart and William Smith colleges, which is upstate New York. So I sort of felt like I was making my way back to, you know, would have like gone to the Midwest and then further into the Midwest, but then upstate New York, I was getting closer and closer to the city. Yeah. And then, and then this job opened up. So.

Tom Trevatt Yeah, you've returned home. Amazing. And it's a kind of auspicious moment to be in New York, right? Very interesting times. New Mayor, how's that going?

Christine Goding-Doty I returned home exactly.

Absolutely, yeah. We're thrilled. We're thrilled. We are as thrilled as we can be with representative government. Yeah.

Tom Trevatt Yes. Yeah, exactly. I remember last summer when I came to visit New York very briefly, we were wandering around the streets and you telling me about this guy, Mamdani, it's the first time I'd heard his name. I was like, who's this guy? I was like, yeah, taking the world by storm. So why might I have asked you to come onto a podcast to talk about photography?

Christine Goding-Doty Really?

Yes.

Tom Trevatt given that presumably you're not really a photographer, but you might consider yourself a theorist of image making perhaps, theorizer of images in more generally, working within the kind of cross-section of visual cultures, cultural studies, philosophy, politics and so on, but also in that kind of like intersection of art making. So some of your students are actually artists, some of them actually do make art.

Certainly in my kind of educational background, you're working with people who aren't just artists, aren't just image makers, they don't make the images themselves, but they theorize it and talk about it. But why am I ever invited you? Well, let's see. One of the things that you've been working on in the last few years is studying, and I'm going to fuck this up, but it's... oddly satisfying videos. What does that actually mean?

Christine Goding-Doty Yeah. Oddly satisfying videos. Yeah, oddly satisfying media is sort of it's a whole genre of videos. It's mostly videos, but it's sometimes images. Sometimes the images are secondary to the audio, really. But it's a genre of media that people circulate that they make, that they consume because of the effect that it has on them. Sort of the emotional effect, the subduing effect, the emotional release it produces. So oddly satisfying media overlaps in some way with ASMR.

and is the kind of media that is supposed to give you some kind of physical bodily reaction when you watch it or listen to it. There are several subsections of it. Some of it is the ASMR, like girlfriend experience or boyfriend experience part that is about the audio that you produce and in some ways the visuals too. I mean, there's... It's that that range of it also goes into what we would more directly call sex work but then there's the other half of it that is images of things like soap cutting or mukbang like the eating videos or the part that I'm really interested in is slime videos and that's both like the production and use of slime at home.

and the whole range of videos that go from some amateur, like a kid who's making slime at home and recording themselves squishing it in these very routinized choreographies, to people who make serious money off of selling slime and they make these slime videos to advertise what it is that you could purchase from them through the internet. And most recently, I've been looking at how AI-generated media has changed or inserted itself into oddly satisfying videos in general because they are no longer part of the appeal, I think, the oddly satisfying is that you're watching something that makes you feel this strange sensation that some person has managed to create by mixing a weird set of materials like in slime, it's sometimes soft and squishy, sometimes it's crunchy or flaky.

And its particular combination is made by the slime artist. So with AI, part of the thing that makes AI videos so uncanny is that they often have these weird combinations of things that most people would not think to put together. And that's everything from a hand having 10 fingers to like the weird mechanics of watching somebody eat spaghetti but the fork goes right through their mouth and it you know it just doesn't really make sense. Yeah, AI slime videos have started to they've come onto the scene they're not exact they are popular and they and they're creating you know huge divides within the Oddly Satisfying community.

Tom Trevatt You used to be a serious academic, Christine. What happened?

Christine Goding-Doty Ha! Well, I can go into what my critique is. Yeah, well, when I was first looking at slime, part of the reason is because this fits into a larger critique that I have of how it is that we talk about the Internet as itself a frontier and the way that we reinvent colonial resources through the myths and values that we attach to the Internet.

Tom Trevatt Tell me. Tell me.

Christine Goding-Doty So if the internet is a space where we really can achieve infinite growth and infinite development, then it satisfies some of the desires of colonial capitalism. And then within that, we are looking to create new resources that can also be infinitely reproduced. So oddly satisfying media contributes to that desire in some way. And slime in particular, to make slime, you need to start with PVA glue. That's like the base of slime. It's so funny, like working on this. I forget that it's not just common knowledge how you make slime. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. I mean, people, you know, for slime became a really big thing that people were making at home and selling to each other in these sort of informal networks.

Tom Trevatt Please, nobody knows, tell us.

Christine Goding-Doty In around 2017. Yeah, sort of like its trajectory. It became very popular in 2017, just about. And there were kids making slime because it's sold to us as a kind of toy and a kind of craft you can do at home. So kids were making slime at home and selling it to their friends. And parents were finding thousands of dollars stashed under their pillows.

because of all the slime that they were making and selling. So it's a real industry. And it's not just a real industry for the individual people who make the slime. It's also that Elmer's Glue, or the company that owns Elmer's Glue, is showing quarter after quarter record profits. Because the demand for glue has just continued to go up. We've also, like in New York, there was a slime museum that was opened that just had, I mean, gallons and gallons and gallons of slime, the huge vats of slime that you could plunge your hands into and, you know, slime raining down from the ceiling, you know. So there is the economic side of it. And then there's also the environmental side. So Elmer's glue, the base of Elmer's glue is PVA. So it's a petrochemical byproduct. And in order to make slime out of glue, you mix it with a bunch of other materials, but it also has to have an activator. And the baseline of that activator is borax, which is an insecticide. And mixing the borax with what is already PVA glue with shaving cream to make fluffy slime, which is called floam, or little styrofoam bits or whatever you're going to mix into it, mixing it with sand even, right? Once you mix in the activator, which the central ingredient to that is borax. It re-polymerizes, so things which were not previously plastic become plastic.

Tom Trevatt Okay.

Christine Goding-Doty And there's a kind of, you know, there's that kind of process presented to us as play, which is also creating this other economic motive because of Elmer's investment in us thinking about slime as something which is satisfying to us, something which calms us down, something that if we play with it, we can fall asleep better, right? It's supposed to, oddly satisfying media is supposed to help us regulate our bodies. and help us do the things that our bodies are supposed to do and help us feel calm. So there's a critique in there about the way that slime brings petrochemical play home.

Tom Trevatt I haven't seen any slime videos listed on like top 10 ways to fall asleep, like on the Andrew Huberman podcast or something, you know, do this.

Christine Goding-Doty But people watch, I mean, there are compilation videos on YouTube of people, and it's not just slime, right? Slime is one part of the oddly satisfying landscape, but there are hours long compilation videos of people squishing, you know, plastic tubs full of slimes who make different shapes or whatever. They make the slime into forms that look like food, and then they squish it with their hands. You don't see the person's face, you just see their fingers or their arms.

and the slime itself. And in addition, there are makeup destruction videos or, as I said before, sand slicing videos or eating videos or whatever that are put into these long compilations so that you can just put them on in the background and fall asleep to the sounds.

Tom Trevatt So there's the ASMR aspect to it, but there's also a kind of proxy affect in a sense. It, presumably most people that are interested in these sorts of things, they're younger people, they're kids or adults watch this.

Christine Goding-Doty It's a whole range. In terms of the viewers, it's mostly adults who are watching to deal with the stresses of living in the present day. They're the ones who are trying to get ASMR tingles or achieve ASMR orgasm from these videos. But the people who are supposedly playing with slime are mostly children. So that's another very strange intersection that's created because of the market of that oddly satisfying media creates, where the people, I mean, now there are adults who do buy slime and they buy it in the same way that people buy like fidget toys, you know, or like the way people, offices would have been filled with stress balls that you could squeeze at your desk because we're just getting paid so little or whatever.

Tom Trevatt Yeah, I guess we have all, throughout certainly my life, there's always been something that has had a place in our life like that, like the stress ball or like the Tamagotchi or the fidget spinner more recently. Presumably, it's just a kind of it's another form of capitalism, solving its own problems, right. Folks struggling with their paycheck at the end of the month. I'll buy some more slime because that makes me feel better. Yeah.

Christine Goding-Doty Yeah, yeah. But it's also interesting the way that it informs then the taste that we have in other parts of our visual world, right? Because slime, first of all, has a very distinct look to it. You know, depending on the color of it and what is mixed into it and its composition, it's supposed to generate different feelings. So there's also a kind of affective habituation or attunement that's happening because of the material itself.

and the way that we associate maybe pastel rainbow colors, iridescent colors, to a kind of soothing and darker colors to a kind of intensity. There's also a whole range of people who do, who make oddly satisfying content that is like, it borders on the violent, you know? There are people who do things like chew chalk and there's like the whole sectors of oddly satisfying media, whether it's just like compilation videos of people eating huge chunks of chalk.

Tom Trevatt Yeah. Does a lot of this come from Southeast Asia? Is there a big influence from say like Japanese anime culture and so on? Is it?

Christine Goding-Doty There's some, yeah, there's some, there's some... What do I want to say? There is some cross-pollination, yes. But I would say it more so begins, if I had to make a guess, because it's internet media, so it's hard to pin down exactly where it starts, but if I had to make a guess, I would say it looks more so like a set of aesthetics that Americans think of as internet normal aesthetics.

Sort of baseline aesthetics of the internet. And whether or not they know if it's informed by anime, they've inherited it from Vaporwave and pale blogs and Tumblr and all the little design features of the platforms that we have already that prioritize smoothness and roundness and softness.

Tom Trevatt So, I mean, in a sense, the look of the internet changes quite regularly. Recent updates to the iPhone has made everything feel much more like glass. It's kind of added a three-dimensional look to it, whereas you know, design norms maybe three years ago was much flatter, kind of much more sort of bolder colors without any kind of drop shadows. And now we're in a new kind of world of smoothness, maybe a kind of new world of, of like, sort of textural smoothness on our phones. Does it, presumably these sorts of things, they all influence each other and they kind of come into like, you know,

Like I'm not looking at my phone thinking, oh, it's an oddly satisfying thing. But presumably, it's an oddly satisfying thing, right? Like the way that it feels in my hand, the way that I interact with it, the way that an app opens up. Like I think Instagram now opens up with a little flame or something like that, or closes with a flame or something. So you have these different kinds of animations that occur when you're using these products.

Yes.

And presumably, you know, we have these kinds of interfaces that give us these kinds of little tingles, these little feelings without us necessarily knowing it. And that's kind of comes, that's the affective nature of the interfaces that we live on on a daily basis. Is there something to... like is there a design trend? Is there like a sort of nameable design wave that's happening at the moment? I mean, you named quite like niche design waves like Vapor, you know, the kind of like sort of web 1.0 turning into, you know, kind of sort of post internet arts and all this kind of stuff. So 2012 to 15 kind of remit of art theory, but like... Is this a reasonably well-known trend? Are you seeing it in other parts of the world?

Christine Goding-Doty I... I'm sorry.

Tom Trevatt So yeah, where are you seeing it? Where else does it appear?

Christine Goding-Doty I mean, I think looking at the new glassiness of the iPhone is a good example of the spread of this kind of trend. Because I also think oddly satisfying media, and including ASMR in that, has certainly changed some of what we accept as beautiful media or media with which we would want to interact.

and I think has in some ways, I don't know how I want to say this. I think in some ways oddly satisfying media has intensified our desires in two opposite directions. So on the one hand, there's the desire for the kind of clear, stretchy slime glassiness. Lots of slime is completely translucent and sometimes it's completely clear. And that is its own kind of taste. And I think trying to make the iPhone screen look like liquid glass resonates with the slime aesthetic norm, resonates with the beauty norms of trying to create glass skin, right? This is sort of like a Korean beauty trend. And on the other side of it, I think the ASMR close mic tingles have created, or they've contributed to our ability to...

watch and like media where the sound quality is terrible. Do you notice this? Like in reels or in TikToks, oftentimes people have these tiny little mics and they hold them right up to their lips and you can hear all the breath and all the crackling of the mic. You can hear the feedback that's created by the wire that the mic is connected to, you know, like scraping against their clothing or, or, you know, that little connection being loose or weird.

And just the levels of audio distortion that are part of the normal landscape of our internet diet, I think, have really, really increased. We haven't completely dismissed the importance of very beautiful, clean audio. But it's no longer a requirement for looking at media and thinking, this is well done.

Tom Trevatt Mm hmm. I mean, I'm thinking of like subway takes when they've got the microphone attached to the subway ticket or sometimes like like kind of semi comedic cooking channels when they've got the microphone attached to the spatula and those sorts of things. Presumably this is an attempt to... It's a kind of kickback against the kind of beautification and the professionalization of media, right? So YouTube once was a platform where anybody could share anything that was filmed on any kind of device and it became very professionalized as people realized that they could make a lot of money from it. So you get highly, highly produced.

audio and video and now there's a kind of sort of return of the authentic maybe I put those that term in inverted comments because I think that it pretends to be authentic it's a it's a we've got the equipment that we can make this beautiful but let's make it badly so it's the kind of let's do things badly is but if oddly satisfying... So is the purposeful badness oddly satisfying?

Christine Goding-Doty Yes, because the thing that creates ASMR tingles are mostly the sounds that are created between what the user is doing and the technology. Not necessarily in the content of what the user is saying, not even in the sounds that the person is making. It's in all the other ambient noise and the way that microphones may pick up and if you have them too close to the source may distort the original noise that you're hearing. So,

It's part of the reason why when people show you something on camera, they often go like this and they tap their fingers to it. That's straight out of the world of ASMR. Because the point is not to see the object necessarily, it's somehow to have like an auditory experience in relation to the object. And those sorts of sounds are not the pretty sounds. Those are all the sounds that audio engineers have been trying to cut out. You know, like I was recently watching a video about film props and how they have created paper bags that are made out of silicone or rubber so that you can have a paper bag in a shot, but the sound of that crinkling of the bag doesn't ruin the audio, right? Because in our sort of traditional filmic standards, you don't want all that extra sound.

But all of that extra sound is the stuff that is supposed to activate this sort of tingly response in the listener or the listener viewer of ASMR. And so, you know, yes, technically it sounds bad, but it's the bad sounds that make us feel good or are supposed to make us feel good.

Tom Trevatt Is this a little bit like for some people, coriander tastes like soap? Sorry, do you say coriander? What would you say? Coriander? Cilantro, okay. So a thing where it's like, you can either do it or you can't. Like you can get the ASMR tingles or you can't.

Christine Goding-Doty Yes. We say cilantro.

Yes, and this is another thing. I don't get them. So when I'm listening to this audio or I'm watching it, it's really grating on my ears. It's terrible. It's so grating and I kind of hate it. But I have a friend who has the response unwillingly. He like hears these sounds that are produced, you know, this like crinkly, you know, almost hollow sounding crackling sounds. And they give him chills and like goosebumps up his neck and back.

Tom Trevatt What's the physiological reason for that?

Christine Goding-Doty It is called, it's what ASMR stands for, which I should know, but I always forget. It's called autonomic sensory meridian response. I'm pretty sure that's what it stands for. So it's really, but it really is an autonomic, yeah, it is an autonomic sensory response that you have to the sound. So it's also in the same realm of sounds of like, for some people, you get a weird feeling when chalk scrapes across a chalkboard. Yeah, not that anyone under 20 even knows what that sound is.

Tom Trevatt Under 35 but yeah.

Christine Goding-Doty Yeah. So that range of sounds, it's that kind of level of response. But yeah.

Tom Trevatt So ASMR folks are descendants of the lookouts from when we were on the Savannah.

Christine Goding-Doty Perhaps. I don't know. If there is truly an evolutionary Darwinist interpretation underlying ASMR, I'll have a book. Yeah, I'll have a real book to write.

Tom Trevatt You'll know, okay, good. Yeah, amazing. So a lot of your research prior to this was about race on the internet, specifically whiteness on the internet. Is this an extension? I mean, I can sort of understand how it's an extension of it in terms of the kind of aesthetics of whiteness. Can you theorize that?

Christine Goding-Doty Yeah, so it's part of the same project actually. And part of the reason why it's the same project is because when I'm thinking about race on the internet, I'm trying to think about all of those things that we could say make us participate in colonialism or coloniality that don't look the way we've been trained to see them. So my thinking about race tries to move away from looking at things like skin color or phenotype. Tries to really get us around thinking about race in biological terms at all. And tries instead to think about the relationship that's created between bodies that reproduces or does not reproduce colonialism. And like for my purposes, I'm interested really in just those events that reproduce colonialism, which is what I call whiteness.

So in some ways, looking at oddly satisfying media is trying to get at a part of the process where these relations that our bodies enter into become normalized. They become aestheticized, we become habituated to them. And this part of the research is trying to really think like how many elements of modern society and modern technology are we encouraged to have these kinds of connections to or enter into relation with. And, you know, the ASMR tingle or the enjoyment of oddly satisfying media is perhaps the most conscious level of how it is that we relate to colonial technologies and colonial desires that are, you know, restaged for us in these new aesthetic forms.

even though they are, you know, they're the sort of like surface level feeling scape to all of the relations that we have to things like undersea oceanic cables or to the minerals that are in our phones and laptops and screens or to those other things that we absolutely depend on and rely on, but we don't necessarily feel.

Tom Trevatt Who else is doing work on this? Is it just you?

Christine Goding-Doty It's not just me. It's not just me. I am a part of some research groups that are thinking about media in the side, sort of thinking about media and the globe and thinking about media and race. But there are not very many people who are thinking about it like this. Like I have a good friend who works on K-pop. Another who works on media and questions of race and coloniality, but is right now working on like international corporations and psychotropics or drugs and pharmacology, that sort of thing. Yeah. And otherwise, there are many people who do work on social media as a kind of pop cultural phenomenon, but not necessarily with the purpose of rethinking what it is that we're seeing, by which I mean, like when I was first starting to do this work at the intersection of Black Studies and Digital Media Studies, I went to several conferences where people determined that they were looking at the media created by Black users because of the photo in their profile and saying like, okay, we can tell these are Black users because there's a Black person in the photo. Like to me, that is... We're sort of becoming, we're dangerously flirting with...

Tom Trevatt He's like a really big fan of basketball or something like that. So I've got Michael Jordan.

Christine Goding-Doty Yeah, I mean, yeah, first of all, we assume that the representation that there's some sort of like one to one representation between people's profile photos on themselves, which we know is not true. But then there's also the question of like, you know, how close to 19th century race science taxonomies of images of faces in a grid do we want to, you know? That certainly can't be the way that we're tracing race on the internet. It can't be because it looks like race to us, you know.

Tom Trevatt Sure. What do these oddly satisfying videos, what do they look like in terms of that particular question about race on the internet?

Christine Goding-Doty Well, there's not much human body in them, which is part of the reason why I like them. I mean, sometimes there is. Sometimes, you know, like if you're watching someone eat chalk, you're looking at somebody's face. But for slime videos, you can usually only see the hands of the person. Sometimes they're wearing gloves.

And really the focus is on the material. So, you know, what you're looking at is a huge vat of slime that someone is like sticking their hands into diagonally like that. Or you're looking at kind of a blank space. It's a very nondescript space. Maybe the background has been embellished in some way. There's glitter around or some other thing that relates to the slime you're going to see squished.

but it's usually a kind of blank nondescript space and then hands appear with a ball of slime in them and they, you know, move it around in these choreographies. Also, sorry, I just want to stop because the postman is delivering the mail on the other side.

Tom Trevatt Okay, Barry, cut the mailman out.

Christine Goding-Doty I can hear when they're done. I think they're done now.

Tom Trevatt What else should I ask you about this? This is really bizarre. So what else should I ask you?

Christine Goding-Doty About oddly satisfying media. It's bizarre.

Tom Trevatt Okay, are we ready to go back on? Okay.

So you started this telling us about the kind of black market of slime production at the very beginning of this, where kids, there's some like 13 year old kid in Ohio somewhere has got stacks of cash underneath their bed because they've made all these slime videos, or slime they're selling to their friends and then it goes onto the internet and it explodes that way. Are they meeting a need? People like prior to slime videos were like desperately in need of this thing or, you know, what's the kind of market dynamics of these things?

Christine Goding-Doty I hope they aren't meeting a need.

And I don't think that they were meeting a need. I think it was just like a cool new toy. Like it comes onto the scene like a cool new product that you can have. And I think in the same way that ASMR gives people an experience that they don't expect to have or they didn't expect to have before this was part of our internet landscape. Because it's also important to recognize that ASMR does not require any advancements in technology beyond what we've had since you could put audio on the internet. And I'm sure that some of the sounds that people like in ASMR videos, which is like the squelching sound of somebody talking with their mouth full, we had that on, you have that on public radio. If you listen to public radio DJs, sometimes they're too close to the mic and you can hear their mouth moving and that sort of thing. So we've certainly had the technology, but I think it becomes a trend, sorry.

Tom Trevatt Does it have to be mediated by technology for it to be successful as ASMR?

Christine Goding-Doty I think so. I think so.

Tom Trevatt So you couldn't go up to the street and eat a chewy chocolate bar or something like that and then get tingles. You're not gonna, okay.

Christine Goding-Doty Yeah. They've tried. They've tried several experiments where they've opened ASMR houses where you can go to this ASMR house and you're supposed to get an ASMR experience without headphones. But those places were very quickly shut down. I can imagine going to a house to get tingles is a strange business proposition, like is it a store, is it an installation, it's sort of unclear. And for the most part people reported that it doesn't give you the same feeling if you're not listening in headphones or if the sound itself is not created originally through them.

Tom Trevatt So it is absolutely the interaction between some form of human and a microphone or some form of technology. Is it only an audible thing? Because you're talking about ASMR on one hand, which is under the umbrella of oddly satisfying.

So you've got that, but then there's the look of those things like squishing some slime. Does it have a similar kind of physiological effect on us?

Christine Goding-Doty Yes. So I think that the two things are supposed to go hand in hand. And I think it's also in the history of oddly satisfying media, it first comes out of a thread on Reddit where people are compiling a bunch of images where you can't quite tell. They're sort of like optical illusions. But then when you figure out what it is, people say like, this is so satisfying.

And then videos started to circulate of things like a door that looks like it's too large for the space that it's in, it's definitely going to bump into something, it miraculously misses and closes perfectly. That's really what oddly satisfying media started out as. And then as it spread to other platforms, like Snapchat in particular, Snapchat would compile, they still compile oddly satisfying channels.

where if you post something and tag it oddly satisfying or tag it satisfying, someone on the back end of Snapchat might take up your photo and put it on the main channel. So that for me was really the moment where a bunch of things that were not like watching a baker ice a million cakes, you know, all perfectly, and that kind of like virtuosic repetition was no longer necessary for oddly satisfying videos. And suddenly, you know you had like teenagers opening a box of a bunch of test tubes in their chemistry class and just looking at the uniformity of all of those test tubes in a box and then posting that to Snapchat and saying like, is this satisfying enough Snapchat? You know, so there was really like when I say it didn't necessarily satisfy a need, it really is like a new cultivated desire, a new kind of performance and mode of participation. It's invented out of something that we can recognize as appealing when you see like, you know, a Rube Goldberg machine or whatever, it's like every ball drops exactly where it should. That is appealing to us, but it kind of like heightens that and creates a different kind of demand for how to participate in that. And it also creates a desire to find those moments in the world. So, you know,

students taking images of just their regular life, finding leaves on the ground and crunching them in their hand and posting, is this satisfying snap? It really demonstrates the kind of desire for approval that also underlies the oddly satisfying community.

Tom Trevatt Interesting.

Christine Goding-Doty Yeah, and then it just evolves from there to include slime and other media.

Tom Trevatt So there is a real sense of reaching out to create a community. There is a sense that they're speaking to potential enjoyers of the satisfying.

Christine Goding-Doty Yes, with the caveat that those enjoyers are available to you through a corporate platform and you'll find them if the corporate platform's algorithm decides to put you in front of everybody else. So it's not exactly like, we all share this sort of taste and what we should do is find each other and create a community. It's very quickly a kind of, you know, do I fit the commercial standard?

Tom Trevatt But these corporate platforms love to leverage the concept of community. That's kind of part of the selling point of this. Like, it's called YouTube for a reason.

Christine Goding-Doty Yes. Yeah.

Tom Trevatt So. I guess the difficult question here is, or the kind of slightly troubling aspect of this is that you mentioned it earlier, mostly it's teenage creators. It's often kids or if not kids, younger people. And sometimes it's younger women. And especially that kind of mukbang food consumption video stuff. Often it's younger women who are being paid by maybe men to consume food. There's a dark side, right?

Christine Goding-Doty There are several. There are several dark sides. I think on the one hand, you know, if we have the idea that the internet is itself a place of infinite development, the associations that we have with that because of our capitalist view is that it's going to do an infinite amount of good. Right? And so then we are disinclined to think in any negative terms about content creation. Like, I don't know if you have seen the upsurge in reports lately where people are suddenly having a conversation about whether or not it's detrimental to children that parents create

Instagram accounts for their children and their children become very well known online. Or reports of parents who had created these sort of Instagram families and then it's revealed later that actually the children basically had no childhood. They spent all of their time taking multiple takes of the same moment and nothing is the real authentic thing and it's all to try to make money off of creating content, right? I think it's also like for anybody who's tried to create content, you have to do an extraordinary amount of labor on the backend to actually make something that looks good, you know? Thank you, Barry.

Tom Trevatt Yeah, thank God we've got Barry.

Christine Goding-Doty So, you know, I think if we are not even willing to acknowledge the amount of labor that it takes to make content that is relatively benign, you know, if you add the extra aspects of like this involves petrochemical play or this creates a very strange relationship between young content creators and their adult audiences.

You know, there are several dark sides to it. And to me, the interesting thing is how is it that the emotional or aesthetic appeal of this thing is hyped up so much that we become blind to those dark sides, right? And we think like, yeah, okay, you know, I just like the way slime looks. Like we don't think about the fact that slime goes bad. We make a plastic product that molds, you know.

Slime will like, it's, people, I mean, like if you have slime for too long, it dries up, you need more activator, more borax, and sometimes that doesn't even bring it back to life. And probably because you've been manipulating it with your hands, it picks up all sorts of bacteria and then it molds. And people have made new versions of slime videos, which is just them dumping all of their old and moldy slime, you know, for disposal.

right? And it's like, it's so polymerized that if you were to do something to try to get the parts of it that could biodegrade separate from the slime, it needs to be professionally treated. And so instead, there are huge, there are videos of people making what are called slime slushies, which is just them taking their, you know, boxes and boxes of expired and moldy slime and putting it into large plastic bags and then throwing it just into the garbage. It just goes into landfill somewhere.

Tom Trevatt Where did they throw it? Right. That's, presumably that's dangerous.

Christine Goding-Doty It's certainly bad. It's certainly bad for the environment. Yeah. You know, but you're throwing away Styrofoam bits, plastic beads, stuff that used to be, you know, shaving cream or clay or sand, plus a bunch of PVA glue. All of it is technically non-toxic, which is why slime is a game, is a toy for kids. It's all technically non-toxic, but it is absolutely toxic to the planet. And, you know, even the disposal process is aestheticized. And if you look at the comments under YouTube videos of, you know, disposing of slime, people still lust after, they think, you know, they say like, I just wish I could stick my hand right into that, you know, into that trash can. We're like, could you send that to me? Could you box it up and send it to me? You know.

Tom Trevatt So there's no regulation.

Christine Goding-Doty No. Regulation, what would you regulate?

Tom Trevatt Um, yeah, I don't know. But so I mean, I know you live in the US, so there's no such thing as regulation. Yeah. Okay.

Christine Goding-Doty We don't have, we don't know what that is. What's that word you said? Spell it?

Yeah, I mean, that's the other part of it that like when you think about what are the downsides, you know, especially in the United States, if you are participating in the image making culture of the internet, you are doing so without regulations, you're doing so in a, you know, in a landscape where you don't retain ownership over the images that you produce, you can't say what those images get used for later, you don't know who's looking at them, it's very hard to restrict.

And also the norm is to have a public account where people can consume whatever media you're making or however you're documenting your life. And that's before we even talk about whether or not the platforms themselves are doing something with the media that you are putting onto them.

Tom Trevatt Crazy. Thank you very much. Lots of stuff to think about.

Christine Goding-Doty Is it bad to say making images is dangerous on a podcast about photography?

Tom Trevatt Making images is dangerous. There's a form of violence to making images, we know that. We know that. Listen, I think there's loads of other stuff that could be spoken about and presumably in another year's time there's gonna be more things that you'd have uncovered. Maybe slime is being replaced by the newest, latest version of whatever it is, but maybe we'll have you back and we can find out what your research is looking into in a year or so.

Christine Goding-Doty We'll find out whether or not AI actually takes it all over.

Tom Trevatt Right, okay, yeah. Yeah, I guess that's the point actually, right? Like AI slime, it's so close to reality. I'm kind of thinking of this, I'm thinking now of there's this video that Trump posted of him bombing some protesters in a plane and there's loads of like excrement dropping on the protesters, right? And so for a certain part of the US population that is oddly satisfying right there's a kind of violent satisfaction in being able to bomb people that disagree with you politically even if it is just with whatever brown sludge is coming out the plane but there's there's a viscerality to that right because there was there's the kind of it dropping and hitting them and their kind of like reaction to that. So there's a viscerality to that kind of aspect of it, presumably is a kind of oddly satisfying thing. And it sort of makes me think that there is this kind of, you know, surface of AI, which feels very like smooth and almost touchable, but you know you're looking at this person, you're like, is it quite, it's not quite a real person, but kind of there's a little sheen that's going on. And obviously with newest versions of AI, they've kind of removed some of that sheen and made it feel as close to like Veo 3 or whatever feels so much more like reality than other versions of AI.

Does that remove something of the kind of, it removes that kind of sheen, it removes the visceral sort of glassiness of AI, which in a sense is part of its, I'm gonna say this in inverted commas, appeal maybe. Now we're just kind of watching things that look just so much like a real video that it's not got the same kind of visceral or sort of affective qualities to it.

Christine Goding-Doty Mm, mm. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing about the oddly satisfying version of this is that the slime videos made by AI look like an older version of AI. The hands are a little bit strange. The way that the materials change from one to another is still a little strange and uncanny. There's a lot of use of gold, which I'm, you know, looking at to see, like, is this a recession indicator?

But like so much of it is like gold that turns out to be slime or a gold bar that you can for some reason grind into a powder, you know. And so it's retained that kind of glossy feeling. And yeah, I think in the rest of the world of internet images. people couldn't abide how artificial it looked. The glossiness of AI goes so much further than airbrushing and plastic surgery.

it puts us into a kind of uncanny valley that then the AI is trying to then pull back from.

Tom Trevatt Yeah. Yeah.

Christine Goding-Doty But it makes me wonder also for you because the rise of AI models is certainly happening. The popularity of AI models is on the rise. There are every day new AI modeling agencies who are creating new Instagram pages for their AI models and putting them doing collabs and putting them into various scenarios to sell different products and things. And I wondered, you know, how did you experience, if I can ask a question, how did you experience that sort of shift away from the overly glossy AI image to something that, you know, is now getting printed in magazines and it just says in the tiniest type, like made by AI?

Tom Trevatt Yeah, that's good.

I mean, from a professional perspective, I'm not especially concerned. Like from my own, from what I do as a photographer, I'm not especially concerned because the majority of what I am paid for is the experience of coming to the studio, having time with me and taking some photographs that feel and look like the person involved in it. Now, you can certainly go on to these various different platforms and generate a nice headshot of yourself if you've got like five to 10 images that you upload, but I don't really feel particularly concerned about my business. I think maybe were I to be a headshot photographer who works purely in volume.

then maybe there's an aspect there that people that I would be photographing are maybe more inclined to use AI because they weren't particularly interested in paying a decent sum of money to come and have that experience in the first place. I mean, from a commercial, were I to be a commercial photographer, say, like especially within the world of like food, drink and product photography, then yeah, I might be a little bit more concerned at that point is it's less about the authentic experience of being in front of the camera and more about just producing an image that sells something. And it almost doesn't really matter how that image is produced. Before AI existed, would, let's say, you're photographing sofas. You'd photograph a sofa in one material, and then you'd use various different tools to change the materials. You wouldn't photograph 30 different sofas with 30 different materials in different houses, you just photograph one and then just use the magic of Photoshop or whatever to change the color of materials from a blue to a red. So, you know, already those tools kind of had an impact on the on the kind of capacity for a photographer to apply their trade. But that's kind of just the story of technology, isn't it really? I suppose.

Christine Goding-Doty I wonder too though, it makes me think like part of what I'm tracking is the way that these obviously very niche trends or aesthetic trends or movements or groups or whatever come into being online and then the way that they inform much more popular tastes. And I guess maybe it's that the smoothness of AI and like that sort of moment where people are making you know, they're trying to make like cartoon versions of themselves that look like My Neighbor Totoro, that sort of thing. Like that period maybe lasted to, didn't last long enough to really affect what it is that people are looking for in terms of, and also for headshots, there are market demands on what a headshot should look like, right? But I wonder too, like, you know, it will be interesting in the next five years to see how AI changes the desires that we have for what images of ours, like what our images of ourselves look like. We've already seen the rise of things like Instagram face and the shift in plastic surgery demand that's also gone way up, right? So it's interesting to think like we still haven't seen the effect that AI generated images are gonna have on what it is that we desire.

Tom Trevatt Yeah. I mean, the amount of times you would be, you know, see a selfie of somebody posted on the internet that you assume to be, you know, the authentic version of them because it's, but it's gone through multiple layers of processing. Firstly, that, by that camera, the camera itself, like the camera on the iPhone processes the images in a very particular way. in a different way to the way that like a film, the celluloid of a film processes an image, right? And, you know, what's more authentic, what's more real, which one's the more real version? Like I'm shooting this video on an iPhone, you're shooting it on the little video camera at the top of your computer, what kind of real version of our faces? And also, you know you put it onto Instagram and we see all of those different filters that are available to us and who is the real person that you're actually speaking to. But, you know, and that does shift our desires. You know, I think that Instagram is one of the number one culprits in shifting sexual desire, for example. Desire for a particular type of body, a particular type of skin, a particular look, a particular aesthetic.

And there's lots of experiments about, say, body fascism within dating. Dating apps are deeply riven by these kinds of forms of exclusivity or so forth. Yeah.

Christine Goding-Doty And the AI portraiture on the dating apps is also crazy.

Tom Trevatt The AI portraiture, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Who wants to date an AI? Yeah, well, people do, I guess. Yeah.

Christine Goding-Doty Well, just makes, I mean, first, yes, of course there are bots, I think also about like the real people who are putting up AI images of themselves on their dating profiles, which raises all the questions you just said of like, who is the real person here? What is the thing that we're trying to accomplish by using an AI generated version of our own face?

Tom Trevatt Yeah. Yeah. I guess the question is really is like, where do you draw the line of the real? Slightly more philosophical question because if the line of the real is drawn after the photograph, like, you know, at the point at which it's purely, well, the photograph is just purely pixels, but what indexicality does the photograph have to reality that the AI version of the photograph doesn't have to reality, I suppose. That's the kind of question. And if you draw the line of the real up before AI, but not before filters or before the way that the iPhone processes your skin versus the way that an Android phone processes your skin, I don't know, where are those particular lines?

Christine Goding-Doty It's certainly a good question. The thing that comes to mind, I mentioned before that I have a friend who works on K-pop and Korean media. And the thing that she's really theorizing is the parasocial relationship. And I think the parasocial relationship probably has something to tell us about the relationship that we have to these images that are not us, but through which we are performing this sort of dance of authenticity to say like, yeah, this was really me. I really ate this food today. I really went this place. This is my real location. Feel free to sell it for ad revenue.

Tom Trevatt Absolutely. Well, I guess that's the point, right? It's because so many people recognize that they can make and do make a significant form of income through publicizing their real life. Right. You spoke about kids being born into families who are Instagram famous and having to perform on a regular basis. Yeah, like, you know you see the countless number of Instagram accounts that have got hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers. And it's essentially just them performing their real life. They don't have any discernible talents. They don't have any discernible skills. It's just, you know, a couple who happen to maybe be, you know, cute and white, talking about, you know, their day to day life and like, I pranked my husband today and those sorts of things. And yeah, like having that kind of performative relationship on the internet means that we have that kind of capacity to monetize that. Okay, so our relationships have been enclosed. Our relationships are now kind of part of that accumulative process.

Anyway, Christine, we've been chatting for a little over an hour and we need to wrap it up. But thank you so much for joining us today. Where can people find more about your research? Are you publishing? Have you got a book coming out? Have you got anything people need to read? What's going on?

Christine Goding-Doty I'm working on it. I'm working on it. And I do have a couple of articles in the pipeline, but they probably won't be out very soon. But yeah, you can, I mean, you can find me on the New School website.

Tom Trevatt There you go. The New School website profile. Search Christine Goding-Doty. Fab.

Christine Goding-Doty Yeah, for all the ways that I research social media, I'm not really on it. So yeah, there are a couple of like open source articles and things that you can read.

Tom Trevatt Amazing. Playing it coy. Very good. Very good. Thank you very much, Christine. It was great to chat. I'll see you soon.

Christine Goding-Doty Thank you for having me, it was so nice. Bye!

Tom Trevatt Bye bye. Cool.