Quotulatiousness

February 8, 2024

North American newspaper economics

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, History, Media, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall discusses some of the issues ailing Canadian and American newspapers which are not easily solvable (government subsidies, as attempted in Canada, just turn the recipients into an underpaid PR branch of the governing party … not a good look in a democratic nation):

“Newseum newspaper headlines” by m01229 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

So, as a little corrective, a quick jaunt through what actually ails American journalism. The concentration is upon the big newspapers because that’s where the problem is worst. The conclusion is that it’s gonna get a lot, lot, lot, worse too. Because the industry is facing a base economic problem that it’s not willing to actually face up to. Or, at least, all the journalists writing about it aren’t — there’s the occasional sign that some of the business side of the equation grasp it.

[…]

Before Y2K American newspapers were segmented along geographic lines. The size of the country, the lack of a long distance passenger railroad network, meant that this was just so. If you’re printing a daily paper then you’ve got to deliver it daily. On the day it’s meant to refer to as well. If Chicago is 1,100 miles (no, I’ve not looked it up but that’s within an order of magnitude of being right, which is better than many newspapers manage with numbers) from New Orleans then the same newspaper is going to find it difficult to print and deliver to both markets. Add in the fact that trains take a week to traverse that distance, passenger trains – anyone who has ever travelled Amtrak will say it feels that long at least — included.

You could not and therefore did not have national newspaper (USA Today, with satellite printing plants, was an attempt to deal with this and slightly earlier than our cut off date but doesn’t change the basic story) distributions. What you had was a series of local and regional monopolies. Each one centred on a large population centre and serving the area around it that could be reasonably reached by truck overnight. Chicago and Cincinnati, not 1,100 miles away from each other, did have entirely different newspapers.

By contrast, and just as an example, the British newspaper market was national from pre-WWI. We simply did have overnight at worst passenger rail that covered the country. Partly it’s a much, much, smaller place, partly the passenger rail system was just different. So, printing overnight (and some maintained separate Scottish editions and plants) meant that those papers that came off the press in London at 8pm were on sale in Glasgow at 8 am, those that came off the press in London at 4 am were on sale in London at 8am. That’s not exact but it’s a good enough pencil sketch.

Cincinnati newspaper(s) served Cincinnati. Chicago, Chicago and New Orleans the area of New Orleans. There simply wasn’t a “national press” in the US in that British sense.

OK. But this also meant that American newspapers were much more like a monopoly in their local area than anything else. Network effects still exist even before computer networks after all. The most important of which was the classifieds.

As with Facebook, we’re all on Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook. So, if we’re to join a social network we’re going to be on Facebook where everyone else is — except those three hipsters who are where it isn’t cool yet. This applies to classifieds sections. Folk advertise in the one with the most readers, the widest market. Readers buy the one with the most ads in it, the widest market. You advertise the bronzed baby shoes, unused, where there are the most people looking for bronzed baby shoes, unused.

So, the dominant paper will suck up the classifieds in any particular market. Classifieds, fairly obviously back in the days of prams, cheap used cars, waiters’ jobs and so on being geographically based.

No, this is important. A useful pencil sketch of American newspaper revenues pre-Y2K was that subscriptions produced some one third of revenues. They also, around and about, covered print costs and distribution. They were, roughly you understand, about a face wash in fact.

Display ads produced another one third and classifieds the final one third. Classifieds were also wildly profitable — no expensive journalists to pay, no bureaux, just a few women waiting to get married on the end of the phone line.

February 2, 2024

QotD: Financial bubbles

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That financial markets sometimes go off on one has been noted for centuries now. Dutch Tulips, the South Sea Bubble, Dotcom and more recently Bitcoin have all shown that the lust for easy speculation profits can lead to, well, to financial excess at minimum. Those with an orderly cast of mind like to point out that all of this is waste. If instead the truly wise and clever people – after we’ve installed them in government or at least the bureaucracy – could apportion society’s assets very much better. You know, truly invest in the diversity advisers civilisation so badly needs.

The thing is, economists often disagree at this point. Sure, financial bubbles, they occur. Sure, there’s waste in them. But perhaps the very bubble itself is an either useful or necessary part of the process.

Necessary in that perhaps it needs a mania to get some new technology over the finish line. I tend to think it’s not going to happen with Tesla but it did with Railway Mania. Without speculators searching for easy money the network never would have been built out. Without Dotcom Amazon probably wouldn’t have got funded through the decade it was scratching a living.

It’s also possible that it’s just useful. For the overbuilding in the mania might then leave assets that are repurposed to get other technologies over that finish line into general use. Global Crossing lost a fortune – no, really billions – on building out fibre optic cabling to girdle the world. Which was, after the bankruptcy, bought up by the Googles and the like to carry all this web and video stuff. It’s arguably true that without the previous overinvestment we’d simply never have developed – or perhaps not for decades – such resource and bandwidth-hungry hogs.

Tim Worstall, “Cloud Rendering – The Latest Proof That Investment Bubbles Actually Work”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-03-17.

January 23, 2024

Sometimes the deciding factor in success really is just “dumb luck”

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Virginia Postrel doesn’t disparage the role of quality, but as one of her own experiences clearly illustrates, you can’t discount the sometimes disproportionate role of luck:

AI is coming along … but it ain’t there yet.
Image by Virginia Postrel, using Ideogram.ai

No amount of planning beats dumb luck. That saying, which I will always associate with the gubernatorial campaign of South Carolina’s James Edwards1, occurred to me while reading Damon Linker’s latest Substack post. His praise of Martin Gurri’s book The Revolt of the Public reminded me of a corollary: When it comes to books, no amount of intellectual quality is enough without dumb luck. It’s an absolute miracle Martin Gurri’s book, which is excellent, has become well known.

I know because I gave The Revolt of the Public a crucial boost — and I only discovered it because my own book, The Power of Glamour, was languishing in obscurity (where it remains). Frustrated with the lack of attention, I spent an evening Googling “visual persuasion” in hopes of finding smart people who might find my analysis interesting enough to mention to others. My search led me to a 2010 article for the Army War College, co-authored by Gurri, titled “Our Visual Persuasion Gap“. I sent him a note: “I read your article on the visual persuasion gap and would like to send you a copy of my book. Could you send me your mailing address? Are you related to Adam?” He responded that he preferred to think that Adam was related to him — his son — and that we should trade books.

To review: 1) I wrote a book related to visual persuasion. 2) Martin Gurri has a long-standing interest in visual persuasion. 3) Gurri wrote a book relevant to visual persuasion. 4) I knew Gurri’s son. And neither of us knew the other existed.

I was impressed by his book. So when Cato Unbound invited me to write an essay on “visual persuasion and politics” and to suggest people to write responses, I recommended him. That was in July 2014. The symposium came and went. Still The Revolt of the Public didn’t break into public consciousness, even among the kind of people who read Cato Institute publications.

Then, in December 2015, I wrote a Bloomberg Opinion column on The Revolt of the Public. I’m sure many people read the column, but only one of them mattered to the book’s public profile: Arnold Kling, who wrote about it on his blog in January 2016. The timing was perfect and Arnold proved an effective, well-connected evangelist. In 2018 Stripe Press issued an updated version in print, audio, and electronic formats. Since then, the book has become a touchstone for understanding the rise of populist movements. Agree or disagree, people trying to figure out our political moment have to consider Gurri’s analysis — which they know about because of dumb luck.

    1. Edwards, an oral surgeon by profession, was a Republican party activist who ran in the 1974 primary against the much better known General William Westmoreland. Then, as now, South Carolina did not have party registration. Any voter could vote in either primary, but if you voted in one party’s primary you couldn’t vote in the other party’s runoff election. The Democratic primary was where the action was that year, with multiple candidates. Only the most stalwart Republicans voted in that primary and they preferred the guy they knew to the celebrity general. The Democratic primary went to a runoff between young post-Watergate reformer Charles “Pug” Ravenel and old guard Congressman William Jennings Bryan Dorn. Ravenel, a South Carolina native who’d only recently moved from New York, won the runoff, only to have his candidacy disqualified for not meeting residency requirements. The Democrats put Dorn in his place, but he was a weakened candidate and voters went with Edwards, making him the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Edwards used to have a sign with this motto, or some version of it, on his desk.

January 19, 2024

Music journalism, RIP

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia explains why music journalism is collapsing and who committed the murder:

Just a few weeks ago, Bandcamp laid off 58 (out of 120) employees — including about “half of its core editorial staff“.

And Bandcamp was considered a more profitable, stable employer than most media outlets. The parent company before the recent sale (to Songtradr) and subsequent layoffs, Epic Games, will generate almost a billion dollars in income this year — but they clearly don’t want to waste that cash on music journalism.

Why is everybody hating on music writers?

Many people assume it’s just the same story as elsewhere in legacy media. And I’ve written about that myself — predicting that 2024 will see more implosions of this sort.

Sure, that’s part of the story.

But there’s a larger problem with the music economy that nobody wants to talk about. The layoffs aren’t just happening among lowly record reviewers — but everywhere in the music business.

Meanwhile, almost every music streaming platform is trying to force through price increases (as predicted here). This is an admission that they don’t expect much growth from new users — so they need to squeeze old ones as hard as possible.

As you can see, the problem is more than just music writers — something is rotten at a deeper level.

What’s the real cause of the crisis? Let’s examine it, step by step:

  1. The dominant music companies decided that they could live comfortably off old music and passive listeners. Launching new artists was too hard — much better to keep playing the old songs over and over.
  2. So major labels (and investment groups) started investing huge sums into acquiring old song publishing catalogs.
  3. Meanwhile streaming platforms encouraged passive listening — so people don’t even know the names of songs or artists.
  4. The ideal situation was switching listeners to AI-generated tracks, which could be owned by the streaming platform — so no royalties are ever paid to musicians.
  5. These strategies have worked. Streaming fans don’t pay much attention to new music anymore.

I’ve warned about each of these — but we are now seeing the long-term results.

This is why Pitchfork is in deep trouble. If people don’t listen to new music, they don’t need music reviews.

And they don’t need interviews with rising stars. Or best of year lists. Or any of the other things music writers do for their readers.

But this problem will get much, much worse. Even the people who made these decisions will suffer — because living in the past is never a smart business strategy.

If these execs were albums, they’d deserve a zero score on the Pitchfork scale.

QotD: How the internet changed the dating world

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Before online dating, the available dating pool was just the people in your town: the people at your local bar, at your church, at your office, etc. Online dating expanded that pool by orders of magnitude, which changed how we think about dating in general. Which makes sense: When people have millions of people to choose from instead of hundreds, lots of things start to change.

First, preferences get formalized. 90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. This also makes sense: When people only spend 2-3 seconds per app, superficial qualities rise to the top.

Online dating also changes our expectations regarding relationships more broadly. Since we now date outside of our circles, it’s now easier to cheat or ghost or just otherwise leave if the relationship isn’t perfect. Why stay in a non-perfect relationship, the logic goes, when there are millions of other potential matches at your fingertips?

This perhaps explains why breakup rates for couples who meet via apps are twice as high as couples who meet via friends and family. Friends and family not only refer better, but there’s a higher incentive to stay in a relationship when there’s the social encouragement of family and friends.

What online dating does is enable hypergamy at a massive scale. Hypergamy is the tendency for women to want to date the best men, no matter where the woman is in the hierarchy. Men also want top women of course, but they’re on average willing to settle for any woman, at least for casual sex, whereas women are much more discerning, which makes sense given women have a much bigger risk than men when it comes to sex, since women can get pregnant. It’s basic biology: Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive.

What we see with algorithmic online dating isn’t a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we’ve created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% of women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them).

Algorithmic dating conflates two markets, the market for relationships and the market for sex under the ambiguous banner of “dating”. What happens then is men on apps try to match with as many women as possible and women try to match with a small selection of higher status men. That leads to the situation where a dating app’s natural equilibrium is that a narrow set of men have “dating” access to almost all the women if they choose to, and they typically do. Even with the best intentions, these men aren’t interested in long-term relationships with all these women. The more options a man has, the less inclined he is to want one single relationship.

To put some numbers on it:

  • Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men.
  • The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.
  • A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile.

And if the majority of women are vying for these men and ignoring the rest of them, that creates both a large amount of lonely women and men. Indeed: 28% of men under 30 have reported no sex in the last year, which has doubled in the last decade. This celibacy level is reminiscent of feudal medieval times. In the old days these men would have become monks or cannon fodder for the war. But these days, they just watch porn and play video games (don’t give up, guys!).

Erik Torenberg, “The Matching Problem in Dating”, Erik Torenberg, 2023-09-23.

January 13, 2024

The ongoing encrapification of the internet – “When I hear the phrase ‘web platform’ I reach for my gun”

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia used to be a techno-optimist, eagerly looking forward to ever-improving online experiences. He, like so many of us, has reluctantly come to the conclusion that those hopes are fading out of sight:

I once loved new technology. I lived in the heart of Silicon Valley for 25 years, and was bursting with enthusiasm for its free-wheeling mission to transform the world — and have some fun along the way.

When the Worldwide Web made its debut, I thought I’d found Nirvana. It was like tech was turning everything into a game.

But look at me now. When I hear the phrase “web platform” I reach for my gun.

Where did it go wrong? Did I just get old and embittered? Or did something change in the tech world?

Let me share a story that might help us decide.

What kind of business spends hundreds of billions over 10 years — just to get worse?

This is a story about the birth of the search engine.

There were no commercial search engines back in 1993. But a Stanford student named David Filo compiled a list of his 200 favorite websites.

His buddy Jerry Yang helped turn this into an online list. They called it “Jerry’s Guide to the Worldwide Web”. Filo and Yang added new websites every day to their list — and classified them according to categories.

This turned into Yahoo.

Here’s my favorite part of the story: These two students didn’t even know they were running a business.

They did it for fun. They did it out of love. They did it because it was cool. “We wanted to avoid doing our dissertations”, Yang later explained.

But a venture capitalist named Mike Moritz heard about Filo and Yang, and tracked them down. The founders of Yahoo were living in total squalor in a trailer littered with stale food and pizza boxes, strewed alongside sleeping bags and overheating computers. A phone rang constantly — but nobody bothered to pick it up.

Moritz was dismayed by this dorm-room-gone-wild ambiance, but he was impressed with the students’ web searching technology. So he asked them the obvious question: How much did they plan to charge users?

Filo and Yang had no answer for this. They wanted to give their tech away for free.

Yahoo wasn’t even selling ads back then. It wasn’t tracking users and selling their private information. It didn’t even have a bank account.

But it was a community and had millions of users.

That was a word you heard frequently in Silicon Valley in the early days. People didn’t build web platforms — they formed online communities.

It was a FUN community. People enjoyed being a member. Even the absurd name Yahoo was part of the game — although early investors hated it.

Yang’s job title was “Chief Yahoo”. Filo’s position was “Cheap Yahoo”.

Investors always hate those kinds of things.

But a new web business, back then, was expected to have a silly name. Here are some of the websites launched in the mid-1990s.

Moritz wanted to turn Yahoo into a business. And the founders realized that their fun community was growing faster than they could handle in their down-and-out trailer. So they sold out 25% of Yahoo for $1 million.

January 12, 2024

The rise of “anti-woke” comedy

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Doyle suggests we should stop calling Ricky Gervais “anti-woke”:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A man’s wife divorces him and shacks up with his boss. Soon after, a friend suggests that he should remarry. “What for?” he asks. “Are you looking for a wife as well?”

It may not be the funniest joke, but that’s because it’s an anecdote from The Lives of the Caesars by the Ancient Roman historian Suetonius. The comedian in this case was a senator called Aelius Lamia whose wife had left him for the Emperor Domitian. For making this casual quip, Domitian had Lamia put to death. Now that’s a bad review.

It might be worth keeping this anecdote in mind when the usual debates flare up about whether comedy “goes too far”. The notion of people being offended by jokes is as old as comedy itself, and often people react angrily if humour isn’t to their taste. The current manifestation of this age-old debate takes the form of a simple dichotomy: “woke comedy” versus “anti-woke comedy”.

Already we are in treacherous waters. It is very unwise to define whole genres by terms that have no settled definitions. The actor Kathy Burke believes that “woke” simply refers to people who are neither racist nor homophobic, which would surely mean that the overwhelming majority of us would happily embrace the term. But for those who have been on the receiving end of the bullying, harassment and intimidation by activists who self-define as “woke”, it is clear this issue is not so straightforward.

Over the past few years, we have seen the emergence of a new comedy movement, one branded by commentators as “anti-woke”, that seeks to push back against the orthodoxies of our time. Its closest historical precedent is the “alternative” comedians of the Eighties, who also took aim at establishment norms and were often similarly blunt in their approach. The key difference today is that there is no broad agreement about where the power in society lies, and so while “anti-woke” comedians see themselves as anti-establishment, their critics insist that the opposite is true.

Consider the example of Ricky Gervais, whose new Netflix stand-up special Armageddon has sparked this most recent round of discussions about the supposed red lines in comedy. Some have accused Gervais of taking a reactionary stance, most notably because of jokes relating to migrants and disabled children. Gervais has been branded an “anti-woke” comedian, but I doubt very much that he would see it in such reductive terms. Anyone familiar with his work will know that he has always lampooned closed systems of thought, and it just so happens that “wokeness” currently represents the dominant incarnation. There was a time when many of Gervais’s critics were perfectly happy to see him take a wrecking ball to the certainties of religious faith. It would appear they take a different view when it’s their own belief system taking a battering.

December 17, 2023

Justapedia, the latest “new Wikipedia“

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Quillette, Shuichi Tezuka introduces the latest challenger to the ever-more-biased free online encyclopedia Wikipedia:

In the aftermath of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter late last year, the journalist Jon Levine asked him: “I wonder how much Wikipedia would cost?” Musk had recently complained that Wikipedia has a “non-trivial left-wing bias”, and a few months earlier, had commented that “Wikipedia is losing its objectivity.” But regardless of whether Musk would have liked to purchase the site, there never was any real possibility of that happening, as stated by Wikipedia’s symbolic leader Jimmy Wales: “Wikipedia is not for sale”.

Following this exchange, there were several discussions on Twitter (as it was called at the time) about whether Musk might create his own alternative to Wikipedia. In the end Musk did not make such an attempt, but approximately eight months later, someone else did.

This new online encyclopedia, known as Justapedia, is the latest in a long series of attempts by various individuals to create a competitor to Wikipedia. So far all previous attempts have either been unsuccessful, or morphed into something so unlike Wikipedia that they could no longer be considered a competitor. However, one thing working in Justapedia’s favor is that the need for such a competitor is stronger now than it has been in past years, due to several recent controversies revolving around the manipulation and/or politicization of Wikipedia, along with a widespread perception that Wikipedia has not done enough to prevent this type of problem.

Justapedia was recently publicized by Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia alongside Wales, during an interview with Russell Brand and in a subsequent blog post. This article will present a more detailed examination of Justapedia’s background, including some of the recent controversies that demonstrate why it is needed, as well as the poor record of success other Wikipedia alternatives have had up to this point. Will Justapedia succeed where most other Wikipedia competitors have failed?

December 15, 2023

Bill S-210 “isn’t just a slippery slope, it is an avalanche”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

You sometimes get the impression that the only person in Ottawa who actually pays attention to online privacy issues is Michael Geist:

“2017 Freedom of Expression Awards” by Elina Kansikas for Index on Censorship https://flic.kr/p/Uvmaie (CC BY-SA 2.0)

After years of battles over Bills C-11 and C-18, few Canadians will have the appetite for yet another troubling Internet bill. But given a bill that envisions government-backed censorship, mandates age verification to use search engines or social media sites, and creates a framework for court-ordered website blocking, there is a need to pay attention. Bill S-210, or the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, was passed by the Senate in April after Senators were reluctant to reject a bill framed as protecting children from online harm. The same scenario appears to be playing out in the House of Commons, where yesterday a majority of the House voted for the bill at second reading, sending it to the Public Safety committee for review. The bill, which is the brainchild of Senator Julie Miville-Duchêne, is not a government bill. In fact, government ministers voted against it. Instead, the bill is backed by the Conservatives, Bloc and NDP with a smattering of votes from backbench Liberal MPs. Canadians can be forgiven for being confused that after months of championing Internet freedoms, raising fears of censorship, and expressing concern about CRTC overregulation of the Internet, Conservative MPs were quick to call out those who opposed the bill (the House sponsor is Conservative MP Karen Vecchio).

I appeared before the Senate committee that studied the bill in February 2022, where I argued that “by bringing together website blocking, face recognition technologies, and stunning overbreadth that would capture numerous mainstream services, the bill isn’t just a slippery slope, it is an avalanche”. As I did then, I should preface criticism of the bill by making it clear that underage access to inappropriate content is indeed a legitimate concern. I think the best way to deal with the issue includes education, digital skills, and parental oversight of Internet use including the use of personal filters or blocking tools if desired. Moreover, if there are Canadian-based sites that are violating the law in terms of the content they host, they should absolutely face investigation and potential charges.

However, Bill S-210 goes well beyond personal choices to limit underage access to sexually explicit material on Canadian sites. Instead, it envisions government-enforced global website liability for failure to block underage access, backed by website blocking and mandated age verification systems that are likely to include face recognition technologies. The government establishes this regulatory framework and is likely to task the CRTC with providing the necessary administration. While there are surely good intentions with the bill, the risks and potential harms it poses are significant.

The basic framework of Bill S-210 is that it creates an offence for any organization making available sexually explicit material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. Organizations (broadly defined under the Criminal Code) can rely on three potential defences:

  1. The organization instituted a “prescribed age-verification method” to limit access. It would be up to the government to determine what methods qualify with due regard for reliability and privacy. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
  2. The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
  3. The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).

The enforcement of the bill is left to the designated regulatory agency, which can issue notifications of violations to websites and services. Those notices can include the steps the agency wants followed to bring the site into compliance. This literally means the government via its regulatory agency will dictate to sites how they must interact with users to ensure no underage access. If the site fails to act as instructed within 20 days, the regulator can apply for a court order mandating that Canadian ISPs block the site from their subscribers. The regulator would be required to identify which ISPs are subject to the blocking order.

December 9, 2023

The coming Micro-Macro culture war … and who’s going to win it

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia outlines the dismal state of the “macro” culture — television, movies, newspapers, book publishing and all the big corporations that control them — with the dynamism of the “micro” culture:

In the beginning, all culture was microculture.

You knew what was happening in your tribe or village. But your knowledge of the wider world was limited.

So you had your own songs and your own stories. You had your own rituals and traditions. You even had your own language.

But all these familiar things disappeared when you went off into the world. That was dangerous, however. That’s why only heroes, in traditional stories, go on journeys.

You learn on the journey. But you might not survive.

But all that changed long before I was born.

In my childhood, everything was controlled by a monoculture. There were only three national TV networks, but they were pretty much the same.

    When I went to the office, back then, we had all watched the same thing on TV the night before. We had all seen the same movie the previous weekend. We had all heard the same song on the radio while driving to work.

The TV shows were so similar that they sometimes moved from CBS to NBC, and you never noticed a change. The newscasters also looked pretty much the same and always talked the same — with that flat Midwestern accent that broadcasters always adopted in the US.

The same monoculture controlled every other creative idiom. Six major studios dominated the film business. And just as Hollywood controlled movies, New York set the rules in publishing. Everything from Broadway musicals to comic books was similarly concentrated and centralized.

The newspaper business was still local, but most cities had 2 or 3 daily newspapers — and much of the coverage they offered was interchangeable. Radio was a little more freewheeling, but eventually deregulation allowed huge corporations to acquire and standardize what happened over the airwaves. [NR: I suspect the “freewheeling” went away once the government started imposing regulations, and the corporate consolidation was enabled when they “deregulated” the radio licensing regime several decades later.]

When I went to work in an office, back then, we had all watched the same thing on TV the night before. We had all seen the same movie the previous weekend. We had all heard the same song on the radio while driving to work.

And that’s why smart people back then paid attention to the counterculture.

The counterculture might be crazy or foolish or even boring. But it was still your only chance to break out of the monolithic macroculture.

Many of the art films I saw at the indie cinema were awful. But I still kept coming back — because I needed the fresh air these oddball movies provided. For the same reason, I read the alt weekly newspapers and kept tabs on alt music.

In fact, whenever I saw the word alt, I paid attention.

That doesn’t mean that I hated the major TV networks, or the large daily newspaper, or 20th Century Fox. But I craved access to creative and investigative work that hadn’t been approved by people in suits working for large organizations.

The Internet should have changed all this. And it did — but not much. Even now the collapse in the monoculture is still in its early stages.

But that’s about to change.

If you don’t pay close attention, the media landscape seems pretty much the same now as it did in the 1990s. The movie business is still controlled in Hollywood. The publishing business is still controlled in New York. The radio stations are still controlled by a few large companies. And instead of three national TV networks plus PBS, we have four dominant streaming platforms — who control almost 70% of the market.

So we still live in a macro culture. But it feels increasingly claustrophobic. Or even worse, it feels dead.

Meanwhile, a handful of Silicon Valley platforms (Google, Facebook, etc.) have become more powerful than the New York Times or Hollywood studios or even Netflix. It’s not even close — the market capitalization of Google’s parent Alphabet is now almost ten times larger than Disney’s.

But here’s the key point — these huge tech companies rely on the microculture for their dominance.

Where is Facebook without users contributing photos, text and video? Where is Google’s YouTube without individual creators?

In terms of economic growth or audience capture, the microculture has already won the war. But it doesn’t feel that way.

Why not?

First and foremost, Silicon Valley is a reluctant home for the microculture. To some extent Alphabet and Facebook are even going to war with microculture creators — they try to make money with them even while they punish them.

  • So Mark Zuckerberg needs creators, but won’t even let them put a live link on Instagram and limits their visibility on Facebook and Threads.
  • Alphabet needs creators to keep YouTube thriving, but gives better search engine visibility to total garbage that pays for placement.
  • Twitter also claims it wants to support independent journalists — but if you’re truly independent from Elon Musk, your links are brutally punished by the algorithm.

This tension won’t go away, and next year it will get worse. The microculture will increasingly find itself at war with the same platforms they rely on today.

And legacy media and non-profits are even more hostile to emerging media. Go see who wins Pulitzer Prizes, and count how many journalists on alternative platforms get honored.

I’ll save you the trouble. They don’t.

November 30, 2023

Canadian government declares victory over Google, then lays down its arms and marches into captivity

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Trudeau government has won a glorious, historic victory over the evil capitalistic powers of Google in the war of Bill C-18. Let all patriotic Canadians raise their hands to cheer our victorious politicians before they have to admit out loud that they fucked up real good:

Heritage Minister Pascale St. Onge has surrendered to Google and Canadian media have avoided what would have been a catastrophic exclusion from the web giant’s search engine.

In the short term, this is very good news. The bureaucrats at Heritage must have performed many administrative contortions to find the words needed in the Online News Act‘s final regulations to satisfy Google, a beast which isn’t easily soothed. In doing so, they have managed to avoid what Google was threatening — to de-index news links from its search engine and other platforms in Canada. Given that Meta had already dropped the carriage of news on Facebook and Instagram in response to the same legislation, Google’s departure would have constituted a kill shot to the industry.

Instead, the news business will get $100 million in Google cash. For this, all its members will now fight like so many pigeons swarming an errant crust of bread.

The agreement will also allow the government, while surrounded by an industry whose reputation and economics have been devastated by this policy debacle, to attempt to declare victory. Signs of that are already evident.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that while 100 million bucks is nothing to sneeze at, in the grand scheme of things it is a drop in the bucket for an industry in need of at least a billion dollars if it is to recover any sense of stability. Indeed, when News Media Canada first began begging the government to go after Google and Meta for cash, some involved were selling the idea that sort of loot was possible.

This did not turn out to be so.

Instead of the $100,000 per journo cashapalooza that was once hoped for, the final tally will be more like $6,666.00 per ink-stained wretch.

That figure is based on two assumptions. The first is that the government has agreed to satisfy Google’s desire to pay a single sum to a single defined industry “collective” that would then divide the loot on a per-FTE (full-time employee) basis to everyone granted membership in the industry’s bargaining group. Google had made it clear it had no interest in conducting multiple negotiations and exposing itself to endless and costly arbitrations. So, as we have a deal and Google held all the cards, it’s fair to assume it got what it wanted — a single collective with a single agreement and a single cheque.

November 10, 2023

Canadian media’s self-immolation an object lesson for British media

Filed under: Britain, Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Marc Edge discusses how Canada’s legacy media joined together in a virtual suicide-pact to force Google and Facebook to give them millions in unearned revenue:

The best-laid plans of Canada’s biggest media owners went badly awry this summer, when Meta began blocking news across the country on its social media networks Facebook and Instagram in response to the Online News Act passed in June. Newspaper publishers lobbied the federal government relentlessly to force Google and Meta to compensate them for supposedly “stealing” their news stories by carrying links to them. But instead of bringing them hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the digital giants, as a similar law has in Australia, their campaign backfired badly in what has been described as “a massive policy blunder“, and “the most spectacular legislative failure in Canada’s living political memory“.

Not only will publishers not be getting any money from Meta, they likely won’t get any from Google either, as they have threatened to similarly block news in Canada when the law comes into effect in December. Ironically, publishers will instead lose millions instead, as the agreements they already have with at least Meta will be cancelled, and probably those with Google as well. The knock-on effect makes it a triple-whammy when you also consider the traffic that news media will lose to their websites from the platforms. Worst affected will be online-only publications which have depended on that traffic to build an audience. Most did not want the Online News Act and many spoke out against it, but they were drowned out by the newspaper lobby led by industry association News Media Canada. It is dominated by the country’s two largest chains, which are now owned by a private equity firm and US hedge funds.

The Online News Act is the second in a series of bills designed to regulate the Internet, which, when taken together, include many of the same elements as the UK’s omnibus Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill now before Parliament. An Online Streaming Act passed in April will tax and regulate digital video services in Canada, which are mostly owned by U.S. companies such as Netflix, Disney, and Amazon. A so-called Online Harms Act designed to combat hate speech and online bullying was introduced in 2021 but died on the order paper with an election call. It was criticised by civil libertarians for potentially prohibiting otherwise lawful speech and was thus being revised, but so far it has not been re-introduced. Legislation aimed at increasing online privacy and consumer rights is also planned.

One of these things, on closer scrutiny, is not quite like the other ones, and a realisation is growing in Canada that the government may have been co-opted in its enthusiasm to regulate the Internet to participate in what has been called a “shakedown” of the digital giants. Canada’s news media have literally been on the dole for the past five years since they lobbied the government for a five-year $595-million bailout that expires next spring. This has prompted publishers to adopt Rupert Murdoch’s successful strategy in Australia of persuading the government to force the digital giants to share their advertising revenues with newspapers.

Canadian publishers lobbied for the Online News Act in part by running blank front pages for a day and also spiked several opinion articles by academics that had been accepted for publication by editors. Canada has long had one of the free world’s highest levels of media ownership concentration, along with Australia. It went to another level in 2000 with the “convergence” of newspaper and television ownership, against which Canada had no regulatory safeguards, unlike most other countries. The multimedia business model collapsed with the 2008-09 recession, when advertising revenues dropped sharply, and Canada’s news media have been lurching from bad to worse ever since. The country’s largest newspaper chain, Postmedia Network, was acquired out of bankruptcy in 2010 by a consortium of US hedge funds which had bought much of its previous owner’s high-interest debt on the bond market for pennies on the dollar. They have since taken more than $500 million out of the company in debt payments. The country’s second-largest chain, Torstar, was bought from its owning families at the outset of the pandemic in 2020 by private equity firm NordStar Capital, which has been similarly stripping the company with closures, redundancies, and asset sales.

October 8, 2023

QotD: Internet – pro and con

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I hate to say “it’s a generational thing”, but it’s a generational thing.

Those of us who came of age before Endless September still regard the Internet as a tool. I can do online in two minutes what used to take me two hours in meatspace. For instance, when I first started working full time, I’d have to waste my entire lunch break on the first Monday of every month taking my physical paycheck down to the brick-and-mortar bank, where I’d fill out a bunch of paper to move money around, which I’d hand to a real person who took her sweet goddamn time filing it, and so on. Fight traffic all the way there, fight traffic all the way back, and yeah, that’s a full hour, even when the bank is relatively close. If that bank is closed, or there’s road construction or something, I’d have to spend all Saturday morning doing it, because banks kept bankers’ hours and so I’d better get there and get it done during the three-hour window the brick-and-mortar place was open. And since everyone else on earth was in the same situation …

These days, I’m hard pressed to remember the last time I stepped a real foot inside a physical bank. There’s simply no need. Everything is automatic. Which is convenient, no doubt, but that’s ALL it is: I’ve saved X minutes / hours in my day, which I can use to do other stuff. Other stuff like “see my friends” or “take a walk” or “read a book”. You know, real person stuff. I might read the book online; I might check my email if there’s nothing else to do; but there too the Internet is just a boredom-alleviation tool; something conveniently to hand that passes the time when there’s no other easily accessible way to pass the time.

I would find it inconvenient, sometimes extremely so, to throw the Pocket Moloch in the nearest lake, but the thought doesn’t fill me with dread. Oh, the Net’s down? Shrug.

Not so with the younger generations. I have friends I haven’t seen in weeks, months, years, but when we get together again, it’s like we were never apart, because we met in meatspace and have so much real, personal interaction to fall back on. Younger generations have “friends” they’ve never met in the flesh. Not once. Tell me “Hey, you’re not going to be able to see Tim for a few months” and it’s no big thing. I can still call Tim, or write Tim a letter, or just catch up with him when he gets back, to hear all the cool stories he has. Tell the younger folks “Tim is offline” and they freak the fuck out. Tim is inseparable from the Pocket Moloch in a way we oldsters can only dimly grasp.

They would, I’m sadly sure, prefer to interact with Tim entirely digitally. If you haven’t done it yet, try to find some young people hanging out in a group. It’s actually not the easiest thing to do – which should tell you something right there – but if you manage it, you’ll notice that they spend more time texting than they do talking to each other. And here’s the real kicker: Half the time, they’re texting each other. The same people who are physically right there.

That’s a mentality I can’t begin to grasp. I wonder if it can be broken. I’m not optimistic.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2023-07-07.

September 29, 2023

Bored? Lonely? No girlfriend? Mister, you want an AI Girlfriend!

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As discussed earlier, GenZ men live in a sexual hellscape unless they meet statistically unlikely criteria. Many of them turn to alternatives like online gaming and porn … but some are apparently paying for AI Girlfriends:

Apparently ads for AI girlfriends have been all over TikTok, Instagram and Facebook lately. Replika, an AI chatbot originally offering mental health help and emotional support, now runs ads for spicy selfies and hot role play. Eva AI invites users to create their dream companion, while Dream Girlfriend promises a girl that exceeds your wildest desires. The app Intimate even offers hyper-realistic voice calls with your virtual partner.

This might seem niche and weird but it’s a fast growing market. All kinds of startups are releasing romantic chatbots capable of having explicit conversations and sending sexual photos. Meanwhile, Replika alone has already been downloaded more than 20 million times. And even just one Snapchat influencer, Caryn Marjorie, makes $100,000 a week by charging users $1 a minute to chat with the AI version of herself.

Of course most people are talking about what this means for men, given they make up the vast majority of users. Many worry about a worsening loneliness crisis, a further decline in sex rates, and ultimately the emergence of “a new generation of incels” who depend on and even verbally abuse their virtual girlfriends. Which is all very concerning. But I wonder, if AI girlfriends really do become as pervasive as online porn, what this will mean for girls and young women? Who feel they need to compete with this?

Most obvious to me is the ramping up of already unrealistic beauty standards. I know conservatives often get frustrated with feminists calling everything unattainable, and I agree they can go too far — but still, it’s hard to deny that the pressure to look perfect today is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. And I don’t think that’s necessarily pressure from men but I do very much think it’s pressure from a network of profit-driven industries that take what men like and mangle it into an impossible ideal. Until the pressure isn’t just to be pretty but filtered, edited and surgically enhanced to perfection. Until the most lusted after women in our culture look like virtual avatars. And until even the most beautiful among us start to be seen as average.

September 17, 2023

How much mis-, mal-, and dis-information do you encounter on an average day on the internet?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I don’t know the answer to that question … although I suspect it’s a pretty big proportion of what you’ll see, especially if you stick to legacy media sites who regularly indulge in cover-up, state propaganda, and outright lies while condemning other media as “conspiracy theorists”. Chris Bray, on the other hand, thinks there are hopeful signs that we’ve passed peak disinformation as the pandemic lockdowns get further behind us:

I’ve been trying to come up with a count: If you consume a typical amount of news media and social media product, how many individual pieces of dishonest, misleading, and calculatedly or ignorantly unreal “information” do you take on board over the course of a typical day?

Walter Kirn’s one-sentence summary of contemporary media is stuck in my head: “This is a world-concealing layer of diversionary and illogical and internally inconsistent noise, under which the world exists somewhere.” How much noise do you have to purge to merely get to zero, not at all informed but not not deeply misinformed? And if you encounter the deep thoughts of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, does the deficit merely double, or is it much worse than that?

Democracy means you must not question or oppose the head of state

I’ve been reading on The Site Formerly Known as Twitter this week that Elon Musk’s refusal to activate the privately owned Starlink network over Crimea is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which now apparently apply to corporate product, and also high treason, for which Elon Musk should be executed. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it’s like the Internet allows strangers to use your brain as a toilet. Although, as the Twitter randos always end up explaining, I just feel this way because I’M PUTIN’S NAZI BUTTBOY.

All day, every day, 24/7/365 — well, maybe with some breaks for sleep, but only if you stop looking at your phone at night — you take on garbage. Your brain is loaded with information barriers, dressed up as information. You read and hear sentences that are designed to prevent understanding.

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