Now We're All That "TK Jewelers Is A Scam" Guy from I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson

The point of TU's AGORA project is to deconstruct and discover the various forms of audience capture that operate in, on, and between us.

All this talk about the AGORA since January 5th, 2025 has gotten people thinking. This post is about how most of the questions or comments I’ve received about this show that I have failed to communicate an important point.

I’ll define the AGORA later, down below, but right now, let’s start out with a transcript of a soundbite from my seminar at the beginning of the year. As with all memorable philosophical points, it is accompanied by a thought experiment that we will refer to as The Moment To Shine (a play off of the expression “this is your moment to shine”).

Your Moment To Shine Thought Experiment:

“Let's say you have 30 seconds to 15 minutes to say your piece to the whole world before you die. And everything you say will be heard by everyone in existence for all time. Not like they'll hear it on repeat every day for their whole lives. That's not what I mean for all time. I mean that they can revisit it for all time. You are the mosquito in amber, frozen in cyber history. And you have a song to sing because you've been all over. You've been through a lot and you might not be the most important person who's ever existed; you might not know what your discourse is based in, but you know that there's something you need to say. What is it? This is your fleeting moment. 30 seconds to 15 minutes. That's the attention span you have. On the far end of the scale, there's people who can pay attention and follow the thread for 15 minutes. And at the other end of the scale, there's 30 second attention spans. What do you say in those 15 minutes? Do you keep repeating the 30 seconds? Do you say the same thing, the same 30 seconds on repeat the whole time?”

The point of the thought experiment is to get you thinking (Thanks for transcribing that, Will!) but it is not The Point. It is a moment on the course to the point. It is supposed to be a corrective measure against what is otherwise an unconscious prior shared by a society defined by The Medium.

We’re All That Guy Now

Social media has commodified and sold back to us all the simulation of having choice and voice. Whether you are a creator or not, everyone has this fantasy today that we are now interconnected and capable of speaking “to everyone” with the mere “click of a button.”

Whether you are a creator or “just scrolling,” we all have new (and yet to be adequately theorized) relations to “the public” thanks to the rapid changes in our media ecology. The Medium grants us this sense that we have instantaneous and friction-free access to limitless choice and voice. Neither is true.

We have become like this character (pictured below) played by the comedian Tim Robinson in episode 2 of season 3 of I Think You Should Leave. The guy is on set for the production of a sitcom. He is a part of the in-studio audience whose only real job is to react with live applause or laughter at the appropriate moments.

This guy, however, got excited when the director said “millions of people” will hear “his voice” in the laugh track. So he thinks it would be a fitting time to share some of his personal struggles.

He is just a man who, in his search for love, got scammed by three companies: TK Jewelers, L&L Limos, and Avani Suits. At the end of the audience laughter or clapping he would whisper to the microphone above the audience little details about what he wants to share.

Of course the team halts production to find out who is adding commentary to the laugh tracks. In typical I Think You Should Leave fashion, the plot takes an unexpected turn when everyone in the production team and in the audience all feel moved by this guy’s story. They decide to “keep a little” of his commentary in the finished product, just in case it will really help someone.

Of course, in our reality, it is hard to imagine that someone doing this would get a gracious hearing. Or so we think.

Though we have trouble imagining a reality in which society could take this guy seriously, social media has succeeded in making us all feel like smartphones provide a similar kind of access. It’s the fantasy of a giant global ear.

Theory Underground comes out of a whole series of organizing-induced and theoretically-informed “realizations.” One of those realizations has been, all along, that this giant-ear(th) fantasy is bullshit. So now what?

The AGORA

Recently, as McKerracher has begun to unveil more of the bildungmech that have been discovered and nurtured at TU, we have simultaneously undergone a growth spurt. This is good, but it also means we have an influx of people who are expecting one thing and then discovering another.

McKerracher’s bildungmech are different from typical theory concepts. Some people have predictably felt bewildered, especially those who expected little more than some smorgasbord of what the scene today considers “theory.”

Unlike the rest of the internet, This is not a potluck or buffet.

The only principle connecting the pot luck or buffet is a plurality of means meant to satisfy a particular end (hunger or community, depending on who you talk to). To say TU is neither a potluck nor a buffet is to say we have a connecting tissue, or telos, that is neither (intellectual) hunger nor community.

We’re doing a lot of things and none of those can be understood outside of how they relate to the other things, which are not just concepts, theorists, texts, or whatever scholastic associations you make to the term “theory,” but, more importantly, includes realities revealed through the fires of organizing.

To “get” all the priors necessary for even being on “the wavelength” then feels like a monumental task for anyone who seriously strives to understand the situation today. That is not entirely the case though, because we are coming up with a method to short-circuit a lot of the “best practices” assumed necessary for “getting people caught up to speed.” That’s what the McKerracher Seminar attempted to cultivate yesterday—more on this some other time.

“Bildungmech” is a term that McKerracher has employed to refer to a set of concepts he has developed over the last decade of organizing. These include “timenergy,” “effort buffers and cool downs,” “harnessing vs. countering tendencies,” “converdictions,” “the TURN,” “the AGORA,” “the DREDGE,” and many more. Some of these are already exoteric whereas others must remain esoteric for the time being.

We don’t have time to get into all that. The purpose of this piece is just to say something about the AGORA in particular.

Even though it cannot be understood outside of reference to a lot of other stuff, I’ll still say some things about it. We’ll get jargon-heavy for a second (because we don’t have a lot of time). Just don’t fret if something is over your head—it probably doesn’t matter too much immediately.

[What follows is a leaked internal memo with a few sections redacted.]

The AGORA is a relational concept that cannot be thought through or fleshed out well without a basis in the fundamental problems, core concepts, and methodological operating assumptions of the research we at SAARUTU (Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground) are using to research the conditions of possibility for large-scale structural change, for the sake of T3 institutions, in the era of the PCFM.

[You can always watch the lecture session I did with Ann on the PCFM (post two-class fractured-mass) here if you like]

Part of the situation with the PCFM requires understanding something about what we have taken to calling the Black and Red Boxes. I set up the AGORA in relation to The Black Box in my first seminar of 2025, which has those terms in its title (available to TU members - become a real member here). The Red Box tie in will come later. All this jargon is just shorthand for the inward facing conversations, not something we would ever talk about when addressing ourselves to the public. (If you’re following the Substack, you might not know a lot of what we are up to, but we also do not consider you “the public.”)

Defining a term that is relational and only meaningful in the sense of a process or method leads too easily to reification. Nevertheless

A short working definition:

AGORA: a hybrid kind of space opened up by an intentional style of oration that (explicitly and implicitly) experiments with different ways of interpolating different aspects of the PCFM by employing strategies and bildungmech that come out of TU's attempt to understand The Situation.

The AGORA is a hybrid space between the Internet and IRL, mixing audiences that are deep in the know with randos who are walking by, dropping in on a livestream, or who happened to be in a class at the University that is collaborating with the AGORA concept.

Gatekeeping is, of course, a necessary means for making a concept more useful in a technical sense, so here's some stipulations: An event doesn't count as AGORA if it doesn't mix IRL and Online audiences while doing something PCFM-based and timenergy-pilled.

This means, in part, that the participants must assume:

1. We are uncertain about the true meaning or implications of “human” and “the social”

2. We don't know how to communicate outside of, or across, the niches in rigorous ways,

3. The message of our central nervous system extended through the environmental medium is TMI + FOMO = ADHD [the rest of this list is redacted because these operating assumptions and provisional conclusions come out of the ongoing research at SAARUTU and the McKerracher Seminar; for now we are only releasing glimpses into all of that (available to TU members - become a real member here)]

4. The discursive means employed harness and counter those tendencies as scientifically as possible (I mean something specific by this that can be expanded on later when I respond to [name redacted]’s fantastic question in the ⁠mckerracher-12-concepts-problems forum (once again, only availably to members)

5. This means that the experiments follow from, and then inform, research that is not just done in the underground, nor just in the academy, but across and between and outside of such spaces.

So what’s the point?

People ask what’s the point trying to talk to everyone? As though that’s the point.

It would be easy for anyone who has heard snippets of the work McKerracher has been doing with

Nance

or the others at SAARUTU to assume that the point is learning to speak in universal terms.

The point is to deconstruct our big Others, to come into a better understanding of the plurality of big Others and master signifiers, and to find a way of making ourselves intelligible within the PCFM. That doesn’t mean learning how to speak to everyone. Not literally.

It’s a bracketing exercise. If our tendency is to assume that we have choice and voice, that we are microdosing community belonging and being ourselves when we are, in fact, captured by a system that commodifies and sells back that fantasy, then we need corrective measures.

Podcasts and streamers alike talk as though they address themselves to the public, while simultaneously having intimate or insider conversations before their voyeuristic audiences. What are the implications of so many people having secret public-facing conversations?

The AGORA is not a solution, but rather a corrective measure that will help us trace the contours of the PCFM. It’s a work of personal deconstruction necessary for truly finding one’s voice, one’s big Other, one’s audience, or for, in a word, conducting socioanlaysis.

Some people experience or observe “audience capture” within the contexts and niche domains of the internet that we have become accustomed to thinking of in such terms. What most people miss, though, is that audience capture is the point of our new media ecology, and there is never a time that you are more audience captured than when you think you are speaking outside of reference to the medium.

We creators, commenters, and conceited voyeurs, have all alike been audience-captured—but none of us more than those who think themselves “not very online.” Online audience capture is like Baudrillard’s Disneyland point: Disneyland exists to make Americans feel like the rest of America is not Disneyland. Online audience capture exists to make the “not very online” feel as though the audiences they have been captured by are, in fact, part of the real public. This unconscious relation obscures the realities of the PCFM and makes it easy for our pseudo activity to pass as real communication or action.

The point of the AGORA is deconstruct and discover the various forms of audience capture that operate in, on, and between us.

Thanks for reading.

Though you can get access to past, ongoing, and future Theory Underground courses, seminars, and special access discussions cheaper at https://theoryunderground.com/subscribe, you can also just subscribe via the Substack to help support the work we do. We charge more on Substack, since we assume only the most elite readership possible when considering this platform. If you are a serious patron of the arts and you want to be a part of something exciting, then consider becoming a founding member for only $7,111.11. Then you can access the special Substack-only subscriber goodies on the other side of this paywall.

P.S.

In the United States? Theory Underground is coming to a city near you in 2025. We might be doing the AGORA downtown in the heart of your city. If you like to host or organize events, if you have a local community that is into performance art or theory experiments, or if you would like to put on a cool event at your venue, reach out to us direct at hello.theoryunderground@gmail.com. We’ll going coast to coast in March, and then again in the summer of 2025. Sneak peak at the event poster below:

Shout out to

Luuk Toebes

for this amazing draft of the tour poster!