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It takes 15.56 minutes to unbox the Thomas the Big Thomas & Friends Pocket Fantasy Station – we were the 9,175,478th viewer of Takahashi Taiyou’s YouTube video. The reference is arcane, lost to most consumers, buried in the depths of industrial history. Thomas was modeled on the E2 class locomotives, built for the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. Only ten of these were built between 1913 and 1916 and all of them were cut up for scrap between 1961 and 1963.²⁴³

There have been many reincarnations of Thomas. One was a locomotive, Jessie, who had lived her life as a shunter in a Welsh steel mill. When she was retired in 1965, she was placed in a children’s playground in Cardiff. Taken from the park in 1980 and restored to working order, in 2011 she underwent a rebuild and gender reassignment so she could look like Thomas.²⁴⁴

And, another layer of reference, almost as arcane: Thomas’ first literary appearance was in 1946, in the second of twenty-six “Railway Series” children’s books written or co-written by an Anglican priest, Rev. W. Awdry.²⁴⁵ Then a television series first screened in 1984 with ex-Beatle Ringo Starr’s narrative voiceover. Then a myriad of products, even Thomas theme parks in the US, England, and Japan. And now about 762,000 “Thomas the Tank Engine unboxing” videos, according to our YouTube search on these words.

The creator of our Thomas unboxing video is Japanese, so it is in wordless gesture language, transcending the limitations of speech in the era of pervasively accessible digital media. The video replaces the immediate time- and space-bound presence of objects in physical shopping with their recorded representation, by this means also transcending time and space for the purposes of online shopping. The unboxing video is to shopping what writing once was to speech, and the transposition just as radically transformative.

The viewer hears no speech and sees no person except for the hands of the anonymous unboxer. The camera is exactly where the viewer would be if they were themselves the unboxer. The vicarious hands are virtually the viewer’s. Third person is transposed into second, then first.^§MS2.2 “Hand of God^§MS2.2a shots,” these are called.

A relation of use values is thus established but in ways that are very different from physical stores. As much as retailers tried to activate bodily interaction with objects, the customer couldn’t unbox like this in the store without damaging the package. Nor would they normally be allowed to take 15.56 minutes to do it. Viscerally, multimodally, this beats in-store shopping, or at least its affordances are fundamentally different. Again, here we encounter another of the transubstantiations^§AS1.1.2a of our time, where the image is experienced spiritually as object, and where by mysterious fiat, another’s body – the unboxer’s – might as well be our own.

Nor is the unboxer caught in the inauthentic wiles of salesperson or the manipulations of shop and mall designs. Beyond the rhetorical seller–purchaser pleadings of advertising, this is authentic user-to-user talk. The amateurishness of the videos is integral to their “truthiness”^§AS2.5.1 – though these are unmasked to some degree once we find that manufacturers give their products for free to unboxers who they can trust will say complimentary things, and the unboxers earn advertising revenues from Google. This information is not publicized, but unboxers report that they get between $2 and $4 per thousand views.²⁴⁶ This is the new, no-wage, take-your-own-risk advertising industry. The advertisements are uncannily well-targeted by virtue of Google’s detailed knowing of you from your search histories, YouTube viewing habits, and the texts of your emails in Gmail and Google Docs that its bots have read.

People have been leaving the malls and the big box stores because of their assimilating, homogenizing tendencies, unavoidable consequences of their affordance as sites of multimodal meaning. Compared to the endless use values to be found in the non-dimensional spaces of online stores,^§AS2.3.1a physical stores have become bland, boring, generic. Their technologies of activation are becoming anachronistic. You never seem to be able to find just what you want. But you can online, with the help of strangers finely calibrated to be weirdly “like you.” People like you will likely be more interested in the same peculiar variant of Thomas the Tank Engine products as you. You can hear their authentic voices in reviews, that is, as long as they are not fake reviews, paid for by sellers.

To achieve even a crude level of differentiation, surveillance cameras had been set up in physical stores in the service of the generic, homogenizing “science of shopping.” In online shopping, these have been replaced by the ever-present “big data” recording of clickstreams, cookie triggers, and screen navigation heat maps – all designed to find new ways to draw the duly differentiated consumer into “the ecommerce funnel.”²⁴⁷

Some things stay the same, principally the absolute singularity of the social relations of the commodity, where the differential interests of retailer and consumer are activated in the mystical transposition between the use value of an object and the social process of its exchange. This is a paradoxically universal differential, for market societies at least, though not of course for other configurations of human life. The meanings of First Peoples that we have attempted to parse elsewhere in this book show that, in a human-wide frame of reference, this apparent universal is historically peculiar. In their time, there were no commodities or markets.

The infinite differentiability of these digital means of production of meaning tends to obscure a universal character that transcends the digital itself, and perhaps even to a greater degree than in the era when assimilation was the primary program. So, we have another kind of reification at work. Immersing ourselves in the endless array of use values, we forget the social generalities, albeit now with the aid of a new technology of forgetting.

After the debased urbanity and corrupted sociability of the shopping mall, against which even Victor Gruen eventually recoiled,^§AS2.3c in online shopping we now have the isolating relation of one person to one screen. Though underpaid and bored, in the store we did at least meet the checkout person, and there was some inkling of the social relations of paid worker and paying consumer. There was also a utopian aesthetic to the mall, even if, for its disingenuousness, this at times wore thin. By comparison, Amazon’s warehouses are factories of the most utilitarian kind, with dreadful working conditions, out of sight and so out of mind, except for the postings of the anti-Amazon activists.²⁴⁸

Meanwhile, the shift to managing reified interests from assimilation to differentiation within the logic of the market is to be witnessed in the shuttered stores and ruined malls. “All that is solid melts into air,” said Marshall Berman in his evocative recall of Marx and Engels; “all that is sacred is profaned.”²⁴⁹

For the last little while in this part of the book we’ve been shopping. But now we’ve reached the same place shopping that Robert Mercer did on his excursion into politics.^§AS2.2.2a In our latest shade of modernity, some things have stayed the same, such as the commodity form, but this much has changed: in the activation of the commodity human interests are now being pushed towards infinite differentiation and asocial fracturing.

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²⁴¹ James Bridle, 2018, The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, London: Verso, pp. 216–17.

²⁴² https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-unboxing-videos-are-so-satisfying-99561095209.html

²⁴³ Brian Sibley, 1995, The Thomas the Tank Engine Man: The Story of the Reverend W. Awdry and His Really Useful Engines, London: Heinemann, p. 123.

²⁴⁴ www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/search-jessie-graffiti-covered-old-14584850

²⁴⁵ The Rev. W. Awdry, 1946 [2015], Thomas the Tank Engine, London: Egmont.

²⁴⁶ www.cnn.com/2014/02/13/tech/web/youtube-unboxing-videos/index.html

²⁴⁷ Matt Isherwood, 2017, Designing Ecommerce Websites, Kindle Edition: Transmitter Press, Location 72.

²⁴⁸ www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/12/7-examples-how-amazon-treats-their-90000-warehouse.html

²⁴⁹ Marshall Berman, 1988, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York: Penguin Books.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 264–267. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Takahashi Taiyou’s Unboxing of “Big Thomas & Friends Pocket Fantasy Station” §AS2.3.1b