Who Holds the Measuring Tape
Convention-forming is a power struggle. This observation is unremarkable among historians of media but conspicuously absent from most popular accounts of technological change, which present the development of new conventions as organic and driven by the technology's inherent properties. The naturalization of conventions is itself a form of power. Gitelman's framework insists that the conventions forming around AI-assisted cultural production — how credit is attributed, how quality is evaluated, how economic value is distributed — are being shaped by identifiable institutional actors with specific interests whose power is unequal. Technology companies control the medium's capabilities and terms of service. Publishers control access to audiences. Academic institutions set evaluation standards. Individual practitioners have the least institutional power, even though their accumulated decisions constitute the raw material from which conventions form. The measuring tape is in someone's hands. The question is whose.
The Substrate's Hidden Authority — Contrarian ^ Opus
There is a parallel reading that begins from the material conditions of AI systems rather than the institutional actors who deploy them. The measuring tape metaphor assumes human hands can control the measurements, but the substrate itself — the massive computational infrastructure, the energy systems, the rare earth supply chains — imposes constraints that no institution fully commands. When OpenAI or Anthropic make decisions about model capabilities, they are negotiating with thermodynamic limits, with the economics of GPU clusters, with the geopolitics of semiconductor manufacturing. The conventions that emerge are shaped less by deliberate institutional choice than by what the substrate permits at scale.
This reading suggests we are witnessing not a power struggle between institutions but a collective submission to infrastructural determinism. The reason AI-assisted production converges on certain patterns — the conversational interface, the token-based pricing, the prompt-response structure — is not because technology companies chose these conventions but because these are the patterns the substrate makes economically viable. Publishers adopt AI tools not to shape conventions but to survive the efficiency pressures the substrate creates. Academic institutions resist AI integration not from principled concern but because their own institutional metabolism cannot match the substrate's pace. Individual practitioners have little power not because institutions dominate them but because both individuals and institutions are subordinate to the substrate's requirements. The measuring tape is not in anyone's hands — it is embedded in the silicon, encoded in the transformer architecture, materialized in the data centers. The conventions forming around AI-assisted production reflect not whose measurements were used but what measurements the substrate itself permits.
In the AI Story
The technology companies that build AI tools have the most immediate influence. They control the medium itself — its capabilities, its interface, its terms of use. Anthropic's decisions about Claude's conversational style, safety constraints, and training data are protocol-setting decisions that shape what kind of cultural production the medium enables. The terms of service that govern use are legal documents functioning as cultural documents — defining the user's relationship to the medium, assigning intellectual property rights, and shaping the economic structure of AI-assisted production.
Publishers have significant influence because they control how AI-assisted texts are categorized, marketed, and presented to readers. A publisher who requires disclosure frames AI assistance as relevant; a publisher who does not frames it as irrelevant. These framing decisions are shaped by market assessment — what readers will accept, what reviewers will praise, what categories will sell. The market does not decide on the basis of truth or fairness. It decides on the basis of what sells.
Academic institutions set standards for scholarly production that determine how AI-assisted work is evaluated and credited. Standards for tenure, citation, and peer review all assume individual human production. AI-assisted scholarly production challenges these standards simultaneously, and the institutional responses — which norms are enforced, which practices are adopted — will shape scholarly conventions for decades.
Individual practitioners — the writers, researchers, and creators using AI tools — have the least institutional power even as their accumulated decisions constitute the raw material of conventions. The Orange Pill's choices about disclosure, attribution, and the inclusion of Claude's reflections are concrete proposals for conventions that do not yet exist. Whether the proposals are adopted depends on forces that extend far beyond any single book.
Origin
The argument distills Gitelman's consistent finding across her historical work: the conventions that settle are the conventions that serve the institutions that adopt them, not the conventions that are most philosophically sound or most accurately descriptive of the production process.
Key Ideas
Asymmetric power. The institutional actors shaping AI conventions are not equal — technology companies have disproportionate influence.
Terms of service as protocol. Legal documents function as cultural documents, embedding institutional interests in the infrastructure of use.
Market mediation. Publisher decisions are mediated by market assessment, which rewards what sells rather than what is true or fair.
Academic leverage. Universities and journals have domain-specific power that will shape scholarly conventions even as market-driven conventions shape other domains.
Practitioner proposals. Individual decisions accumulate into the raw material of conventions but lack the institutional power to validate themselves.
Debates & Critiques
Some scholars argue that the diffuse power of individual users — their capacity to refuse specific platforms, to develop alternative practices, to organize collectively — counterbalances the institutional power Gitelman emphasizes. Gitelman's response, grounded in historical evidence, is that diffuse user power matters at the margins but rarely determines the core conventions of a medium absent strong institutional coordination.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Layers of Determining Force — Arbitrator ^ Opus
The question of convention-forming depends critically on which layer of the system we examine. At the interface layer — how users interact with AI, what metaphors guide understanding — Edo's institutional analysis dominates (80%). Companies like Anthropic genuinely do control whether Claude presents as assistant, collaborator, or tool. Publishers genuinely do shape market categories. These are deliberate choices by identifiable actors. But at the infrastructure layer — what computations are possible, what scales are economical — the contrarian's substrate determinism holds more weight (70%). No institution chose the transformer architecture's dominance; it emerged from what worked at scale given material constraints.
The temporal dimension further complicates the weighting. In the immediate term (next 2-3 years), institutional actors have significant power (65%) to shape conventions through policy, market positioning, and standard-setting. But in the longer term (10+ years), substrate constraints become increasingly determinative (75%) as the thermodynamic and economic realities of large-scale computation assert themselves. The conventions that survive will be those that align with what the infrastructure can sustainably support, regardless of institutional preference.
The synthetic frame that holds both views recognizes convention-forming as a multi-layer process where institutional power and material constraint operate at different scales and timeframes. The measuring tape metaphor remains apt but incomplete — there are multiple tapes operating simultaneously. Institutions hold the cultural tape that measures meaning and value. The substrate holds the physical tape that measures what is computationally possible. Individual practitioners navigate between these measurement systems, their accumulated practices forming conventions that must satisfy both institutional legitimacy and infrastructural viability. The resulting conventions are neither purely chosen nor purely determined but negotiated within a possibility space that different forces shape at different scales.
Further reading
- Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New, Chapter 3.
- Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (University of California Press, 2011).
- Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019).