Quotulatiousness

December 14, 2022

PayPal channels its inner Justin Trudeau

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canada’s current Prime Minister found a neat work-around to punish peaceful protestors and their small-scale financial backers by getting Canada’s chartered banks to freeze their bank accounts and credit cards. He didn’t bother getting a law or even an Order-in-Council to do this. He merely had the Finance Minister have a friendly chat with the banks’ CEOs and it was a done deal at least for a few hundreds or thousands of Canadians. PayPal clearly admires Justin Trudeau’s forthright moves to crush dissent and — being a financial institution itself — has been doing similar things to wrongthinking individuals and organizations who (used to) use PayPal’s services:

If you’re one of the lucky ones and your account has just been suspended, you can go to customer service, explain your situation and hope that someone gets back to you. If you’ve been banned, you’ll need an attorney to file a subpoena for the internal PayPal documents — simply to learn why you’ve been banned. (Good luck getting unbanned.)

These are entrepreneurs, writers, academics, activists — the very same people PayPal, whose mission is “democratizing financial services”, was meant to empower. 

PayPal won’t say how many of them it has suspended or banned. In June 2021, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil-liberties groups wrote a letter to PayPal and Venmo, calling on them to open up. So far, they have not, said Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The people who founded PayPal — the so-called PayPal Mafia — include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Max Levchin. All are champions of free speech. All have expressed shock and dismay at what is happening to the company they created. Several founders agreed to talk with The Free Press for this article.

“If the online forms of your money are frozen, that’s like destroying people economically, limiting their ability to exercise their political voice”, Thiel told me. “There’s something about destroying people economically that seems like a far more totalitarian thing.” [Justin Trudeau smiles]

When they launched PayPal, in December 1998, the founders imagined themselves connecting people to the global economy by sidestepping the hefty fees charged by credit-card companies and the inflationary policies of poorly run governments. Early PayPal users had Palm Pilots, and they would beam money from their devices to anyone with an email address. It was especially popular among eBay users. 

“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before”, Thiel said at a company meeting, in late 1999. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means, because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect, dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”

Since those early heady days, PayPal has amassed 429 million active accounts. Fifty-eight percent of Americans use PayPal, and in 2021, there were 19.3 billion PayPal transactions. It now has a market valuation of $84 billion. 

But the company that was meant to liberate countless individuals is becoming something else.

Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above. 

A cynic might say that the original idea, “democratizing financial services”, has been implemented with a capital “D” which makes it all make sense in an American political context.

Our Nuclear Alternate Future?

Filed under: Business, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Big Car
Published 9 Apr 2021

In the 1950s, as the Cold War was heating up and children were being urged to “duck and cover” from nuclear weapons, car companies seriously proposed powering their cars using lead-lined nuclear reactors. It seems like madness today, but while the world saw the threat of nuclear war, they also saw the seemingly limitless potential from nuclear power. Just how were these vehicles supposed to work and how far did they get to reality?
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December 12, 2022

Before the High Power was the FN Grand Rendement

Filed under: Business, France, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Aug 2022

The Browning High Power story begins with a French 1921 request for a new military pistol. FN engineer Dieudonné Saive developed a double stack, single feed magazine and John Browning adapted a Browning 1903 pistol to use it, and this was sent to France for consideration. This pistol worked well enough, but the French trials board requested changes … and they would continue requesting changes and more trials for the next decade.

By 1931, FN felt that the current iteration of the pistol — while still not meeting all the French requirements — was good enough to stand on its own as a service pistol for the Belgian Army and other clients. They named it the “Grand Rendement” (High Efficiency) and began marketing it. The Belgian Army showed a definite interest, and bought 1,000 pistols for field trials, based on the prototype example we have in today’s video. These would become the Grande Puissance, aka the High Power.

For more details on this and other FN Browning pistols, I highly recommend Anthony Vanderlinden’s FN Browning Pistols, soon to be released in its third edition:

https://www.fnbrowning.com/book-fn-br…
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December 8, 2022

Meta (the artist formerly known as Facebook) moves to clamp down on political discussions in the workplace

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

Tom Knighton on an uncharacteristic corporate move by the artist formerly known as Facebook:

My favourite reaction to Facebook rebranding as “Meta”.

It seems there are certain words employees aren’t really supposed to bring up in the workplace.

    Meta (formerly Facebook) has reportedly told its employees not to discuss sensitive issues like abortion, gun control, pending legislation and vaccine efficacy at workplace.

    According to a report in Fortune, citing a leaked internal memo, Meta has banned employees from discussing “very disruptive” topics, including abortion, gun rights, and vaccines as part of new “community engagement expectations”.

    “As Mark mentioned recently, we need to make a number of cultural shifts to help us deliver against our priorities,” read the company memo.

    “We’re doing this to ensure that internal discussions remain respectful, productive, and allow us to focus. This comes with the trade-off that we’ll no longer allow for every type of expression at work, but we think this is the right thing to do for the long-term health of our internal community,” it added.

Unfortunately for Meta, employees hammered them on the fact that they could talk about Black Lives Matter, immigration, and trans rights.

Now, they’re not really wrong to call out the hypocrisy, but this sounds like just a first move, and it’s a step in the right direction.

What would have been a better move is simply prohibiting discussing politics with your coworkers unless it directly pertains to your job. For example, if you are responsible for content moderation and a new bill will impact how you conduct that moderation, that’s one thing.

But topics ranging from Black Lives Matter to gun control are all contentious issues, and while Meta might have allowed that discussion in the past, they probably won’t indefinitely.

This is interesting to me, in part because we’ve seen the woke in the technology sector essentially bully employers into following along with the left’s agenda. Yet when they tried that with Netflix, the streaming giant basically told them to suck it up.

That was in May, but it may have triggered companies to realize that they didn’t have to play the woke game.

Last week, in the weekly wrap-up, I included this story about how Disney’s returning CEO Bob Iger is trying to have the company step back from the political ledge. Iger is far from a conservative, mind you, but he’s come to realize that his personal political agenda isn’t going to sell.

Granted, he started them along that path, but he’s recognized it’s not a great road to go down.

Now, we have Meta that may be venturing on a similar path to Netflix, setting the stage for what’s appropriate and what isn’t.

December 7, 2022

Facebook’s strategy for collapse

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

Ted Gioia clearly isn’t a Facebook fan — and I sympathize, having lost access to my Facebook account a few years ago — but it’s not just people like us that have contributed to Facebook’s epic decline:

Most companies fail because of competition. They simply aren’t fast enough or smart enough to keep up with the marketplace.

But the big web platforms aren’t like that.

In many instances, they are quasi-monopolies. They are so big and powerful that they hardly need to worry about competition.

After all, who can match Google for search? Who can beat Amazon for online shopping? Who does more to keep you connected with family and friends than Facebook? Who helps you clean out the junk in your garage better than eBay?

But even the most dominant players can falter. There was a point in living memory when Sears controlled 30% of all retail spending in the US. I’m not exaggerating: three out of every ten dollars were spent at Sears.

Sears once operated 3,500 stores. Today only 22 are left. Many of my readers have never seen the inside of a Sears store.

This happened because Sears was so big that it didn’t need to worry about competitors.

That sounds impossible. How can you fail by being too powerful? But this has happened in many instances, even on the web. There was a day when Yahoo was the leader in search. There was a day when MySpace was the dominant social network. There was a day when Tumblr was the place to share photos.

There was even a day when the two companies in total control of your access to the Internet were called Netscape and America Online.

Not anymore.

This has happened before and will happen again. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

[…]

The situation at Facebook is now uglier than MC Hammer’s wardrobe closet. Meta is the worst performing stock in the S&P 500 this year. In other words, there were 499 other companies in the composite that did better — and this was a tough year all around in financial markets.

Mark Zuckerberg has personally lost more than $100 billion. In fact, he lost $11 billion in a single day. Has that ever happened before in human history? Almost exactly 12 months earlier, I’d written an article entitled “Meta Is for Losers” — but even I never envisioned losses on this scale,

Of course, there are many losers in this story — including the 11,000 workers who got fired a few days ago.

What’s going on?

You probably think that this is the result of Zuckerberg’s fool’s bet on the Metaverse. That’s what everybody is saying. But as we shall see, the Metaverse is just a symptom not a cause.

I can actually explain the problem in one sentence:

Instead of serving users, the dominant company decides it’s better to control them.

This would never occur to a small business. The owner of your neighborhood deli or gas station has no grand plans to control people — for the simple reason that this is an impossible dream.

That’s the reason why they say: “The customer is always right.” It’s not because the customer isn’t often wrong. Customers are frequently wrong — go listen to them sometimes and cringe at the stuff they demand. But if you’re in business, you must act as if they’re right even when they aren’t. And you do learn things by listening, even (or especially) when their demands are excessive.

By the way, you succeed by listening in every sphere of your life — starting at home.

There’s a good reason why students at hospitality school are told never to use the word never — or “no” or “can’t” or “impossible” — when talking to clientele. Instead of saying: “No way, dude, we’re not putting mayonnaise on your pizza, that’s disgusting”, you offer something positive:

I wish we could do that, dude, because it does sound super tasty — but I will put extra mozzarella on your slice, and our high temperature oven will give it a kind of mayo texture.

That’s how you roll in retail.

But at Facebook, the customer is always wrong.

December 4, 2022

QotD: In praise of mediocrity

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There is much to be said in favor of mediocrity, of course. Without mediocrity, there could be no excellence. We cannot always be living on the heights of Mount Olympus, and surely even the most fastidiously intellectual person has found pleasure or relief in curling up with a second-rate detective story (Wittgenstein did so, besides which there is something to be learned from every book ever written). I have derived much comfort from mediocrity, my own included, and it is my experience that, for a variety of reasons, the greatest experts in their field may make poor witnesses. A person of mediocre accomplishment is often better.

Mediocrity is not a problem in itself; it is inevitable. Indeed the world needs many mediocrities, that is to say mediocrities who know themselves, and are perfectly content, to be such (complacency is as much an underestimated quality as rebelliousness is an overestimated one). The problem with mediocrity begins when it is allied to overweening ambition, as it seems so often to be the case nowadays.

Ambition is likewise a quality that is excellent when it attaches to something worthwhile in itself, but which is dreadful when it does not. And the rapid and phenomenal spread of education has increased the spread of ambition with it, much of it inevitably of the apparatchik type, that is to say the determination to climb some bureaucratic career ladder detached from any purpose except survival and, if possible, self-aggrandizement. To climb such a ladder you have to be both ruthless and submissive at the same time. You have to be egotistically prepared to stab people in the back in the scramble for advancement, while at the same time being prepared to suppress your own personality by uttering other people’s clichés at the expense of your own thoughts. Unpreparedness to do this, either through lack of training or moral scruple, unfits you for a career in the organization, any organization. You have to learn to lie with clichés, and do so with a straight face.

Theodore Dalrymple, “In Defense of Mediocrity”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-02-17.

December 3, 2022

QotD: Mantetsu and the Kwantung Army

Filed under: Business, China, History, Japan, Military, Quotations, Railways — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When the Japanese decided to become a modern power, they consciously chose to emulate American business practices. But these were the business practices of the Gilded Age, so Japanese businesses ran in a way that would have the most hardened Robber Baron drooling — horizontal integration, vertical integration, trusts, combines, mergers, the works.

Thus the South Manchuria Railway Corporation, originally contracted to develop a defunct line in a disputed territory, soon developed into a full-spectrum enterprise. Pretty much all heavy industry in the Japanese areas of Manchuria were divisions of Mantetsu. But since all the heavy industry depended on mines, and transportation, and food and housing for workers, and banks, and schools for the workers’ children, etc., pretty soon Mantetsu ran all of that, too. By the late 1920s, you could argue that Mantetsu was almost its own country.

It even had its own army, and that’s where things get really interesting.

The Kwantung Army was the security force assigned to the South Manchuria Railway Zone. The Japanese weren’t stupid; they knew the perils of independent commands far from home, and they rotated units through with some regularity. Nonetheless, the command staff remained fairly stable over the years … and so did Mantetsu’s.

The Japanese weren’t stupid, but they were people, and people being people, soon enough the lines between the Kwantung Army and Mantetsu began to blur. And since the lines between Mantetsu, the Imperial Army, and the government were already pretty blurry, pretty soon the concerns of one became the concern of all. (Nor was the Navy left out, though I’m not discussing them in order to keep it simple. They were up to their eyeballs in Mantetsu, too, because warships need lots of steel and steel comes from Manchuria).

A small but highly committed and totally ideologized faction developed inside the Kwantung Army. Several, in fact, and one of them (the Imperial Way faction) attempted an actual coup d’etat in 1936. It was put down, and the Imperial Way faction dissolved (in theory), but the problem of an intensely ideologized officer corps remained. Long story short, you had a small group of highly ideologized officers garrisoning a remote province pulling the entire Empire into big, unwinnable wars.

One could make the case that World War II in the Pacific was ultimately caused by about fifteen or twenty guys in the Kwantung Army.

That’s overly reductionist, but it highlights the huge problem with organizations slipping the leash. In theory, there was a clear chain of command, and even the head of the Kwantung Army was a down it a ways — he was subordinate to the Army Council, which was subordinate to the War Minister, who was subordinate to the Parliament, who were subordinate to the Emperor. In theory, lots of people could’ve sacked Gen. Araki, or his mini-me Ishiwara Kanji (a lieutenant colonel through most of it). Equally in theory, Mantetsu had no say in any of it — the Kwantung Army was a formation of the Imperial Japanese Army, not Mantetsu’s private security force.

But in reality, Mantetsu was so wired in to the Japanese government that in a lot of cases, it was the government. But not always, because the same could be said about the Army, and the Navy, both of which were also wired into Mantetsu up to the very top (or vice versa, your choice). And Mantetsu had their Media arm, of course, as did the Army and Navy …

What all this boiled down to, then, was a power vacuum. I know, that seems weird, but a skilled bureaucratic infighter like Ishiwara never lacked for groups to play against each other. The Army and Navy would oppose on principle any move that seemed to aggrandize the other, neither could go against Mantetsu (and neither could control it), and all had to pay at least lip service to the civilian government. Because of this, real power fell to whomever had the balls to grab it …

… which was the officer corps of the Kwantung Army. They assassinated at least two Manchurian warlords, staged a number of false flag attacks on their own positions, and generally got up to however you say “standard issue Juggalo fuckery” in Japanese, up to and including a full-scale war with China.

Severian, “Slipping the Leash”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-27.

November 26, 2022

Indigo vastly prefers selling pillows, candles, and tchotchkes of all kinds rather than – ugh! – books

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte explains why it’s becoming harder and harder to find actual books in Canada’s biggest bookstore chain … because they no longer want to be a bookstore chain:

“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0

We need to talk about Indigo. As you know, it’s Canada’s biggest bookstore chain, with 88 superstores and 85 small-format stores. It sells well over half the books that are bought in stores in Canada, with Walmart, Costco, and independent bookstores accounting for most of the rest.

One problem with Indigo is that it’s failing. The other problem is that it’s abandoning bookselling. Yes, that sounds like a Woody Allen joke, but it’s not funny from a publishing perspective. We depend on Indigo.

The company’s finances have been ugly for some time. It lost $37 million in 2019, $185 million in 2020, and $57 million in 2021. Things looked somewhat better in 2022 with a $3 million profit, but the first two quarters of 2023 are now in the books (it has a March 28 year end) and Indigo has already dropped $41.3 million.

[…]

Indigo hasn’t come right out and said we’re through with books. It can’t, given that Heather [Reisman] has spent the last twenty-five years building herself up as the queen of reading in Canada. Also, the Indigo brand is still associated with books in most people’s minds and that won’t change overnight no matter how many cheeseboards it stocks. So Heather talks about a gradual, natural transition: “We built a wonderful connection with our customers in the book business. Then, organically, certain products became less relevant and others were opportunities.”

To be clear, books are irrelevant; general merchandise is the opportunity. Heather recently appointed as CEO a guy named Peter Ruis who has no experience in books. He comes from fashion retail, most recently the Anthropologie chain, which sells clothing, shoes, accessories, home furnishings, furniture, and beauty products. Anthropologie was hot in 2008, and it seems to be where Indigo wants to go today.

Fair enough. You own a company, you can take it in any direction you want, so long as your shareholders will follow. I don’t blame Heather for having second thoughts about the book business. (I have them every week. It’s a tough business.) But where does that leave readers, writers, agents, publishers, and everyone else who remains committed to books?

You’ll recall that Indigo and Chapters, between them, decimated the independent bookselling sector in Canada in the nineties. They are the principal reason Canada has so few independent bookstores today. You could probably fit the combined stock of all our independents into a handful of Heather’s stores.

The federal government let Heather’s Indigo buy Larry Stevenson’s Chapters in 2001, which gave her a ridiculously large share of the market. That shouldn’t have happened.

At the same time, with the help of some lobbying by Heather, the federal government made it clear that the US chains, Borders and Barnes & Noble, weren’t welcome up here. The argument was that bookselling was a crucial part of our cultural sector and needed to be protected from foreign domination by the Canadian government.

In that spirit, Indigo also asked the federal government to prevent Amazon from opening warehouses in Canada. That request was denied in 2010, which is about when Indigo began its transition out of books.

One can see how Heather might feel betrayed by the federal government. Instead of protecting bookselling, it swung the door wide open for Amazon. You said I wouldn’t have to compete!

The Volcanic: Smith & Wesson’s First Pistol

Filed under: Business, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 Aug 2017

The deep beginnings of the Volcanic go back to Walter Hunt’s Volitional Repeater, which became the Jennings repeating rifle, which then became the Smith-Jennings repeating rifle when Horace Smith was brought in to improve it. Smith was able to make it more commercially viable than the Jennings had been, but he recognized that the system needed significant changes to really become successful. He had met a fellow gun designer who had similar ideas, by the name of Daniel Wesson, and the two would spend a couple years developing and refining the system. In 1854 they thought it was ready for production, and formed the Smith & Wesson Company.

Included in the original company was a man named Courtland Palmer, who owned the patent rights to the Jennings system. Smith & Wesson’s system would probably have been deemed an infringement of Palmer’s patents, and by bringing him into the company they avoided legal trouble. The fact that he was a relatively wealthy financier of the new company certainly didn’t hurt!

The pistol that S&W started producing was a manually repeating one with a tubular magazine under the barrel holding either 6 or 10 rounds. It was available in the .41 caliber Navy model (note: not actually adopted by the Navy) and the .31 caliber pocket version. In this first iteration, both used iron frames, which were all engraved lightly. The prices were pretty steep, and the guns suffered from some reliability problems and a fundamental problem of underpowered ammunition (the .41 caliber had a muzzle velocity of just 260 fps / 79 m/s). However, they did offer a much greater level of rapid repeating firepower than the muzzle loading revolvers of the period, and gained some loyal fans. In total, just 1700 of the guns were produced before the company went bankrupt, about a year after forming.

To recover from that setback, they reformed the company into the new Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, and sold stock in the new company to generate a new supply of capital. This allowed them to get back into production, and the Volcanic company would make another 3000 pistols, all .41 caliber Navy types, before also running out of money 19 months later in 1856.

At this point, Smith and Wesson decide to move in another direction, and one of the main creditors of the Volcanic company was able to acquire all of its assets and put the guns into production a third time. The name of this creditor? None other than Oliver Winchester. Winchester puts a new infusion of his own money into the company under the name New Haven Arms Company. This company produces another 3300 guns, both large and small frame by 1861. The New Haven company comes very near to bankruptcy itself before finally changing the design to create the Henry repeating rifle. The Henry’s rimfire ammunition finally solved the reliability and power problems of the Volcanic, and became the starting point for Winchester to become one of the predominant American arms making companies.
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November 24, 2022

A History of Ketchup

Filed under: Asia, Business, Europe, Food, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 12 Jul 2022
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November 20, 2022

Printing books in China is economical, but also allows China to censor what you print

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, China, Economics, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte explains why some of Sutherland House’s books are now being printed in China … and illustrates some of the risks of having them printed there:

We decided last spring to offshore some of our book printing to China (see “The Crisis in Book Publishing”, SHuSH 138). It was not a difficult decision. The difference in price is enormous.

For instance. Next week we’re releasing a book called The Prison Lady: True Stories and Life Lessons from Both Sides of the Bars by Phyllis Taylor. Presales have been strong. We need to print more copies. We can’t go back to the original Chinese printer, which charged us $2.08/copy, because it takes months to get books from Guangzhou to Toronto. We need the books now. So we shopped around. The best North American price we could find is $4.39/copy.

Why is that a problem? The book is a paperback priced at $22.95. The retailer takes half that, leaving us $11.50. After our distributor and sales agent take their fees and we pay the author her royalty, we’re left with $6.32 out of which we pay for editing, cover art, design, overhead, and shipping. And printing. If the printing bill comes to $4.39 a copy, we make no money.

Those of the economics of a straightforward paperback. A friend of mine recently called about a quote from a Canadian printer for a full-color illustrated book that came in at $15.31/copy. It seemed steep, so I sent the exact same specs to a Chinese printer who quoted $5.27/copy.

[…]

Our initial plan was to print four of our spring books in China (we’re also using printers in Turkey and India). The files for the first two of the four were delivered last month. On Nov. 7, we received the following email from the printer:

    After more detailed review of some of the written content of these two books, there are some significant censorship concerns related to certain references to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.

    As you may be aware, China vehemently enforces a “one China” principle in which Hong Kong and Taiwan are part of the “one China”. Therefore, China censorship will not allow any reference to either Hong Kong or Taiwan as its own country.

    With this in mind, there is some “sensitive wording” on page 46 of The Big Exit that would not be possible to print in China due to it implying that Hong Kong and Taiwan are “countries”.

The Big Exit isn’t about politics. It’s a book about end-of-life choices or, more particularly, how we can dispose of the remains of a billion boomers over the next several decades without wrecking the planet (conventional burial and cremation are both environmentally reckless). The censorship issue arose in this paragraph, which the printer helpfully circled in bright red:

I grant that while Hong Kong still shows up in a lot of data as its own country, it is technically an administrative region of China. Taiwan’s independence is also disputed by China. Against China’s claims, we have the Frank Zappa rules of diplomacy which recognize as “a real country” any place with its own beer and its own airline. Taiwan and Hong Kong both qualify.

In any event, we are now printing The Big Exit in India.

November 17, 2022

“The most disturbing concept Freud ever invented – and he had a few, that bloke – is Thanatos, or the ‘death instinct'”

Filed under: Books, Business, Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia on the apparent death wish of the academic publishing industry:

The most disturbing concept Freud ever invented — and he had a few, that bloke — is Thanatos, or the “death instinct”. This is an alleged drive among living organisms to destroy themselves.

Many have disputed that such a thing exists. Instincts preserve life — that’s their evolutionary purpose. The idea of a death instinct is impossible, so the critics claim. It’s like that Peacekeeper Missile or soft rock or marijuana initiative or any of those other two-word combinations of things that don’t belong together.

I’ve often criticized Freud, but I’ve come to accept this Thanatos notion, at least as a sociocultural concept. It explains so many otherwise inexplicable happenings in our society.

Take, for example, academic publishers. They are clearly imbued with a death instinct, no? How else can you explain their self-destructive behavior?

Universities have been publishing books for almost 500 years — dating back to 1534 A.D. when King Henry VIII allowed Cambridge University to set up a printing press. Running one of these publishing outfits is almost a requirement if a college wants to rise in the rankings, but I wonder how much longer this can last. After all, how can you succeed as a publisher if you put so little energy into selling books?

I know one academic publisher that previously sent out two hundred or more review copies of each new book — because they obviously wanted publicity for these titles. Those days are gone. Nowadays their preferred strategy is to send out zero physical copies to reviewers. I’m not exaggerating — I’ve heard it straight from their mouths: their goal is to distribute absolutely no hard copies to media outlets and book critics.

    College students are spending 26% less on textbooks this year. That’s a bloodbath for the publishers. But this is the inevitable result whenever you assume the customer has no choice — because, sooner or later, they actually do.

Okay, I don’t blame the publishers entirely — just consider how rarely the New York Times reviews books from academic presses. You might think the cultural elites in New York would give some support to their fellow travelers in idea-mongering, but no dice. They treat those academic books like they’re toxic.

(By the way, I’m grateful to the Times Literary Supplement over in London, which still takes time to tell me about important scholarly works, most of them ignored in US media. But even that last holdout in Britain feels precarious — I fear they’ve been too contaminated by Yankee values.)

Yankee values? That’s up there with the Peacekeeper Missile.

But the lack of review copies is just one symptom among many. Let’s look at a few others.

Just consider the flurry of rebranding efforts in academic publishing. As I’ve explained elsewhere, successful organizations rarely redesign their logos or “refresh” their brands. They don’t have time for such nonsense. But even more to the point, when you’re thriving, your logo is part of that success — it’s a sign of your strength, and you just don’t mess with it.

But that’s clearly not the case in academia nowadays.

I could give you countless examples from college campuses — where “rebranding” is more popular than a hot high school football prospect on a recruiting visit. But I’ll settle for two instances:

My only disappointment is that these brand redesigns didn’t come packaged with a new slogan. May I suggest something along the lines of: Information Solutions for a Changing World.

Or maybe, if we can be a bit more boastful: The Ultimate in Handheld Data Storage.

Does anybody still believe in this rebranding malarkey? Surely any reasonable person can see it’s all smoke and mirrors? But that hardly matters, because the brand redesign has tremendous symbolic value.

That’s why they do it.

The road to hell was once paved with good intentions — but nowadays we settle for symbolic gestures. They’re much cheaper than good intentions. And there’s no shortage of symbolic gestures nowadays — more than enough to pave that whole damned highway to hell.

It’s a shame that symbolism doesn’t pay the bills. Or fix problems. And it certainly won’t sell books.

November 10, 2022

Contemplating the end of brand franchises like Star Wars

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

Ted Gioia is wondering how Star Wars ends:

Original Stormtrooper Hero Helmet from Shepperton Design Studios + originalstormtrooper.com

Lately, I’ve been wondering how Star Wars ends.

Let me be clear, I’m not worried about how the story resolves, or what happens to the characters. I have zero interest in all that. Darth Vader can win the Nobel Peace Prize, for all I care.

I’m more concerned with how a powerful brand franchise loses its stranglehold on the culture. And it’s not just Star Wars, it’s all those other stories that never achieve closure. I’m talking about Batman and Indiana Jones and James Bond and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or MCU, for short), and the rest of them.

They all die, sooner or later. But how?

Heroes in capes and colorful costumes seem invincible now, if only because these fictional flâneurs are bigger than anything else in commercial culture. If Spiderman and Batman were real people, they would boast higher incomes and net worth than any flesh-and-blood entertainer in the world. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, which Disney acquired back in 2009, must be worth ten or twenty times the $4 billion they spent back then — total revenues from Marvel brands since then are somewhere around the one trillion dollar mark.

No pop star in history has ever possessed that kind of earning power.

Can these franchises just go on forever? The management team at Disney certainly must hope so, judging by their never-ending slate of Star Wars, Marvel, and other brand extension offerings. No Time to Die isn’t just the name of the 25th James Bond movie, but a promise for the future — why not another 25 films in the series? Or 50 or 100?

But brand franchises do die, or become so tired that few people care anymore. Universal Studios made so much money from Ma and Pa Kettle films that these corny comedies allegedly saved it from bankruptcy in the 1940s, but by 1960 audiences had lost interest in the predictable formulas of the series.

The Carry On films were the most dependable audience draw in British comedy, but after 31 movies the franchise could carry on no longer. A final resuscitation attempt after 14 years not only failed at the box office but was voted the worst British film ever made.

Some franchises not only die, but become genuinely toxic as attitudes evolve — killing, for example, the Charlie Chan franchise, and making it unlikely that Tarzan or the Lone Ranger or many other once lucrative brands will ever enjoy another meaningful payday.

None of this should surprise us, because narratives and protagonists go in and out of fashion like anything else. A story that charmed your grandparents is unlikely to interest your grandchildren.

November 8, 2022

The inevitable next act of the media subsidy game – “Before long we will be back for more”

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

In The Line, Peter Menzies outlines the state of play in the continued efforts of the federal government to pass C-18, a bill that will massively benefit certain media outlets … or convince the “tech giants” to pull out of the Canadian market altogether rather than pay the blackmail:

News Media Canada’s persistent campaigning finally produced its Holy Grail — Bill C-18. All might have been well for Torstar, Postmedia and Le Devoir except that once the flesh was thrown on the bones of the Act, broadcasters that aren’t facing economic peril heard the dinner bell and came running.

The result, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, is that Bill C-18 is expected to produce $329 million in annual revenue for Canadian media (for context, that’s less than the Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun and Calgary Sun were bringing in between them 20 years ago). Of that, $249 million will go to broadcasters, few of whom are on a fiscal ledge and a good many of whom have contributed to the demise of local newspapers. Remarkably, the CBC, already receiving $1 billion in taxpayer funding, will get the most of that cash, followed by CTV (Bell), Rogers, Videotron and others. The newspapers and start ups will have $80 million (a little more than what the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Sun used to make in combined annual profit) to fight over.

And very few of those previously mentioned startups — run by mostly young and often female innovators — trying to find a sustainable business model for good journalism can expect anything more than a token pay off. No. They will have to go to the little kids table and see what they can find on the children’s menu of subsidies.

It is distressingly obvious that while so many were tricked into believing this was the most progressive Canadian government ever, it is in fact, a slave to the status quo; as staunch a defender of the corporate establishment as the Toronto Club could wish for. With the 21st century and all its opportunities staring it in the face, Justin Trudeau’s government has not only turned its back on innovation, it has put its thumb on the scale in favour of failed business models that long ago ran out of ideas.

Yet there may be a final twist in this tale.

Bill C-18’s particulars are, as Meta/Facebook’s Kevin Chan put it to a Parliamentary committee last week “globally unprecedented”. For all its sins — and for all we know there are a few more skeletons rattling around in its closet — Meta is unlikely to pay up. Sure, it can cover the Canadian shakedown; what it can’t afford though is to pay every other country in the world that makes the same demand. So Meta says it may simply stop serving up news links which, when you think about it, is a better idea in the long run than permanently entrenching its dominant market position

So while the publishers of those blank pages appear to have bullied even the Conservatives into supporting this travesty, they are still left to ponder:

“Imagine if Facebook wasn’t there.”

November 7, 2022

The only way to get a Grammy Award rescinded

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

I don’t follow the various entertainment industry awards (Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, Tony, etc.), so I wasn’t aware that only one Grammy Award has ever been taken back since they started handing them out. Given how disturbing the career lowlights of celebrities can be, what level of horrifying behaviour or criminal action does it take to have the award rescinded? Ted Gioia has the details:

“Milli Vanilli Blame it on the Rain (12 inch single)” by acme401 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Milli Vanilli, a pop duo act from Munich, will never enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They were hot back in 1990, and even won the Grammy for Best New Artist. Their debut album eventually sold ten million copies. But Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, the two musicians who performed as Milli Vanilli, are remembered today as a scandal and blot of shame on the music business.

What terrible thing did they do to get blacklisted and cancelled? You may already know, and if not, I’ll tell you.

    Milli Vanilli’s Grammy was rescinded — the first and only time that has happened in the history of the award. I note that Bill Cosby still has his eight Grammy Awards. Even after Phil Spector’s murder conviction, nobody took away his prizes and honors.

But allow me to put matters in context first.

Looking back on the music stars of that era, it would be hard to create a greater scandal than, say, Michael Jackson. He was eventually arrested and charged with child molestation. Although Jackson never got convicted, the cumulative evidence is very troubling — even so, he gets plenty of airplay nowadays and is still lauded as the King of Pop. A high-profile musical celebrating his artistry opened on Broadway earlier this year.

The songs are great. I won’t deny it.

Jackson escaped a prison sentence, but many other music stars have served time for high-profile crimes without losing their fans. When R. Kelly recently got convicted of kidnapping, sexual exploitation of a child, and racketeering, his sales soared 500% in the aftermath. I’d prefer to disagree with those glib experts who claim “all publicity is good publicity” — but it’s hard to argue with those numbers.

Just a few weeks after the Milli Vanilli scandal, Rick James was charged with kidnapping and sexual assault — and then got arrested again for similar abuses three months later while out on bail. He continued to make recordings after his release from Folsom Prison, and returned to the Billboard chart. Health problems, not James’s criminal record, finally curtailed his career. And in 2020, his estate got a big payday by selling his masters and publishing rights to the Hipgnosis Song Fund.

Other music industry legends have committed murder or manslaughter. Suge Knight won’t become eligible for parole until 2034, and Phil Spector died while incarcerated for murder in 2021. The latter was widely praised in published obituaries, and his recordings remain cherished by fans.

And now let’s turn to Milli Vanilli.

Milli Vanilli haven’t fared so well. You might even say they have been wiped out of pop music history, lingering on merely as a joke or worse. But no one got raped or murdered by their antics. They didn’t even trash their hotel rooms or get arrested buying weed.

So what did they do that led to permanent cancellation?

Their crime was posing as vocalists on their recordings, when they didn’t actually sing. When they went on the road, they lip-synced on stage. And — if I can be blunt — their greatest transgression was making the people who vote on Grammy awards look foolish.

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