Quotulatiousness

November 16, 2021

Mike Solana interviews Chris Best, the co-founder and CEO of Substack

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

Not long after I started hearing about Substack, some of my favourite writers and bloggers began to move their work to the new platform. I now subscribe to more than a dozen Substack authors, although being a penniless blogger, I’m restricted to the free offerings in each case. Thus far I’m definitely seeing Substack as a positive influence in the online world, so this Mike Solana post was of some interest to me:

MIKE SOLANA: In your and Hamish McKenzie’s recent essay, “The internet needs better rules, not stricter referees”, you say Substack is changing the publishing model. Before we get into all that, how would you characterize the publishing landscape before Substack?

CHRIS BEST: My general story on this is we’re coming out of an age of attention-monster social media. People used to get bored. People used to have this problem of like, I don’t know what to do with my time. Then the internet, and especially the mobile internet, took over ALL of our time and attention. It filled up every crevice in our life.

In the first phase of that — the attention suck — it was like this giant land grab. If you were making something that competed for attention space, you wanted to grab as much as possible, as quickly as possible, because there’s only so much. You were competing for people’s 10 minutes while they were waiting in line at the grocery store or whatever. So publishers made content free, and they made it as broadly-compelling as possible. The goal was to grab as much attention as possible in the lowest friction way possible, and to turn that attention into money through advertising.

And listen, none of that was nefarious. None of that was like, people with tented fingers going, “Aha! This will create something bad!” But when you create a system like this, you end up with a certain incentive structure. Then, if you build your algorithms to serve your business model, the incentive structure you create for people participating in your network drives a certain sort of behavior.

The platforms all optimized for things that brought cheap engagement at all costs, that interaction weighed to some of the worst aspects of human nature, and drove emergent behavior that gave us many of the things we see today. The legacy media just got totally steamrolled by all of this, and lives in the world created by these platforms.

SOLANA: Do you really feel that Substack is completely protected from this scaled advertising dynamic with its subscription model? There are a lot of legacy media institutions that have subscriptions, and have had subscriptions for the last 10 or 20 years, in addition to running ads. Personally, I’m also getting requests to run ads on Pirate Wires fairly often. I’m not biting, which maybe answers my question before I’ve asked it, but … do you really see this all changing?

BEST: I think the subscription model is necessary, but not sufficient, right? First of all, as a writer, that you can actually make real money doing this is by itself a big deal. I’ve convinced a lot of people to do subscription instead of ads, and usually they come back to me later like, “Thank you, you changed my life. I can’t believe I was ever thinking the other thing.”

People tend to think about this like, “I could make money with ads. I could make money with subscriptions. Two moneys is better than one money.” But when you’re making the best possible product to drive subscriptions, what you end up having to write is qualitatively different — and better — than the thing you’d have to do to drive the most ad revenue.

If you want to earn and keep the trust of a relatively small number of people who value your writing really deeply, deeply enough to pay for it, and you want that number to grow, the work you do in that world is different than the work you do if you’re like, “I need to get as many people to hear my Casper mattress ad read as possible.”

However, to your point, it’s not enough. One of the big problems with Substack now is people are like, “Great, we’ve got this place where the incentive structure works differently, and I want create this better product to earn and keep the trust of my subscribers … but the way that people find out about my stuff is still on Twitter.”

So we’re kind of downstream from this, you know, attention sewage factory of incentives. I think for Substack to live up to the idea of letting readers take back their mind, and their attention, and helping us all create this kind of alternate universe of content with different laws of physics … we need to do more on that front.

October 14, 2021

The quasi-monopolies of the “web giants”

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

Arthur Chrenkoff runs afoul of automated “community standards” enforcement on social media, getting locked out of his Twitter account for something that any actual human being would be able to instantly decide was not at all any kind of violation of normal human interactions online or in-person. Of course, if you’ve been in this position yourself, you won’t be surprised to find that launching an appeal of the bot’s action does not get immediate response … and sometimes never gets any attention from a human. He’s aware of this, and he’s still of the belief that this does not call out for any kind of government intervention:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I remain broadly sympathetic to the free market argument that competition will, in time, cure any problems that business activity throws up from time to time, such as market domination or underhand practices. The mighty will be brought down low, new players will offer new products, consumer preferences will change, creative (or destructive) equilibrium will be restored. We can all argue, of course, to what extent free market and free competition exist in any particular setting at any particular time. If “real socialism” has never been tried, “real free market” (as opposed to capitalism, which is not necessarily the same thing) might be equally rare in practice. It is certainly true that comparing the lists of top 50 biggest companies one hundred, 50, 20 years ago and today will indicate a lot of economic change, but might not tell us very much about the reasons for that change, which can be quite complex.

The tech giants might not be historically unique as far as their size and power are concerned, but they’re not the norm either. They are not exactly monopolists, but their domination of their particular sections of the market elevates them from the domain of mere companies to something akin to public utilities. Google, Facebook and YouTube, for example, account for 80 per cent of digital advertising in Australia. There are alternatives to all these providers but they are so tiny by comparison as to defeat their main purpose for many users, which is to provide the biggest possible reach and exposure to the world. If you get demonetised or banned by YouTube, other video-sharing platforms can give you only a fraction of the traffic and the eyeballs, which impoverishes you literally and the internet users metaphorically, since they are now less likely to be exposed to the broad range of content. There are other social networks, but only Facebook has “everyone” on it, including your grandma, school friend from primary, and that couple you’ve met on the trip to Spain. Sure, if you get banned from Facebook, you can still try to keep in touch with all these people via many separate channels but it’s so much more difficult, disjointed and time consuming. For that same reason, Facebook’s Marketplace has a much better reach than other platforms that are focused exclusively on online ads. If Marketplace continues to shadow ban me, I can try Craigslist or Gumtree or Locanto, but – certainly in the categories I’m interested in – they all have significantly smaller audiences.

The traditional response to bad customer experience has been “try somebody/something else”. You don’t like Facebook – or Facebook doesn’t like you? Try another similar service. But I’m not sure if most of my friends would be able to name even one alternative to FB, and the chances they are on it are even slimmer. So telling people to stop whining and use an alternative to the tech giants is akin to telling someone “Oh, you can’t have a mobile (cell) phone? So what, no one is stopping you from writing a letter!” It’s the same but different. This is the consequence of the domination of the internet by the Googles and the Facebooks. And the internet now does play an essential role – for better or worse – in our lives and work. Hence the comparison to public utilities. Facebook might not be quite like electricity or running water, but it’s very close to, say, phone service. Yes, you can opt for another social network, but compared to Facebook this would be like a phone company that only makes it possible for you to contact one in twenty people instead of just about everyone, and even then maybe only once a week, at a time predetermined by the provider. It’s a service of sorts, but so inferior in every way to the main game in town as to be incomparable.

I’m not offering any solution to this problem. Many, both on the left and the right, are increasingly of a mind that, like Standard Oil of more than a century ago, the tech behemoths of today need to be broken down into smaller and less powerful units. That could solve some problems but won’t solve many others. Like mine, for example; a somehow “smaller” Twitter and Facebook can still be unresponsive and unaccountable. And as we know from other areas of economy, greater involvement and control by the supposedly impartial government does not guarantee better outcomes either. Big government, like big business, is run by human beings who, quite apart from their own characteristics as individuals, work within a particular culture, which has its own values, agendas and preferences. Government is a monopolist too in many ways, and for all the politics, is not necessarily responsive and accountable either.

September 23, 2021

QotD: The problem with “free” tech stuff

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

… I’m baffled by this idea — seemingly everywhere in modern marketing — that they can somehow annoy you into buying their products. Music streaming services like Spotify are all but unlistenable because of it — not only do you get four ads every three songs, but three of the four ads ask “Want a break from the ads? Join premium!!” Or … you know … I could just go back to listening to tunes the old fashioned way. Humanity’s Greatest Genius, when he lays off that shtick for a minute, actually has some good riffs on this. We all must learn to deprogram ourselves from the Cult of Free. If they’re giving away the product, then you are the product. Much like a college degree, “free” tech is actually negative equity — you’re actually worse off for doing it.

It has gotten so bad lately that they don’t just barrage you with ads, they’re now starting to force-feed you content. I used to have Amazon Music — the free one, of course — because it was a good way to listen to The Z Man’s podcasts and my classical library during my commute. I’d download albums to my phone, switch to “offline” mode, and listen that way. Which Amazon obviously considers no good, because they pushed out some “car mode” bullshit that now automatically turns your wifi on, then starts blasting hip hop at you. And that’s not all! A few weeks back, while trying to figure out a way to turn the damn thing off, I noticed that it now has a “your playlist” feature, based on “your” music … which is, of course, the same force-fed rap shit I’ve been trying so desperately to avoid. It has decided that not only shall I listen to Young Jeezy, Big Weezy, and MC Funetik Spelyn, I will also like it, to such a degree that they will start force-feeding me other shit based on my “likes”.

Yeah. Uninstalled. Fuck you, Bezos. I’ve got a CD player. And when Microsoft decides that I’m not listening to the right music on that, and uninstalls the driver, I’ve got a tape deck. And when that breaks, I will sing to myself as I go down the highway. 99 bottles of beer on the wall, motherfucker, just like bus trips back in Boy Scouts. Enough is enough.

Severian, “Mailbag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-18.

August 31, 2021

QotD: “It’s not news, it’s irritainment”

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

“Did you watch the news last night?”

“Yeah, I watched [Tucker Carlson/Rachel Maddow].”

Except that’s not the news. That’s an editorial program where a person gets performatively angry about their opinion of selected bits of news so that you get angry about it along with them … righteously angry enough to sit through an hour’s worth of commercials.

It’s not news, it’s irritainment.

Tamara Keel, “It makes me so mad!”, View From The Porch, 2021-05-25.

July 24, 2021

QotD: Demolishing the Tim Hortons myth

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

I’m here to help. This is a safe place, Canada. I want to see you get through this. Which is why I need you to listen to me closely. These words will be painful, but it’s important you hear them:

Tim Hortons is not a defining national institution. Rather, it is a chain of thousands of doughnut shops, several of which have working toilets.

Tim Hortons is not an indispensable part of the Canadian experience. Rather, it is a place that sells a breakfast sandwich that tastes like a dishcloth soaked in egg yolk and left out overnight on top of a radiator.

Tim Hortons is not an anti-Starbucks choice that makes you a more relatable politician or a more authentic Canadian. Rather, it is a great place to buy a muffin if you’ve always wondered what it would be like to eat blueberry air.

There is no shame in having been caught up in the Hortons hype. It happens. Just last week, a columnist in the Toronto Star likened Tim Hortons to a precious vase that’s about to be juggled by its new owner, a monkey. (I was so irate at this irresponsible journalism that I wrote a letter demanding the Star issue a retraction. Everyone knows monkeys juggle only coconuts.)

Meanwhile, the NDP’s Peggy Nash — who, by all accounts, is an actual person and not a fictional construct of The Onion — gravely warned of the potential consequences of the Tim Hortons brand “falling into foreign hands.”

Yes, imagine the consequences. Maybe these madcap foreign owners will go so far as to alter the sandwiches so they taste like … something. Preferably like sandwich, but, at this point, most of us have stopped being picky.

Am I getting through to you, Canada? While we’re on the topic of hard truths, there is something else that needs to be said.

Canada, you sure do like your double-double — or, as it is by law referred to in news reports, the “beloved double-double.” But here’s a newsflash for you: If you drink your coffee with two creams and two sugars, the quality of the coffee itself is of little consequence. You might as well pour a mug of instant coffee or sip the urine of a house cat mixed with a clump of dirt from your golf spikes. It’s all basically the same thing once you bombard it with sweet and dairy. You’re really just wasting your …

I see from your reaction that I’ve crossed a line. I hereby withdraw my defamatory comments about the double-double and kindly ask that you return that handful of my chest hair.

Scott Feschuk, “Okay, Canada: It’s time for the hard truth about Tim Hortons”, Macleans, 2014-09-14.

July 18, 2021

“Yes, we know Facebook is not the only harmful corporation on Earth, but sweet-jeepers-boy-howdy it is a blood-curdling fart in the elevator of existence”

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

At Damn Interesting, Alan Bellows bids an unfond farewell to Facebook:

For the past few years, we at Damn Interesting have been hearing from scores of long-time fans who were under the mistaken impression that we had ceased all operations years ago. These fans are typically delighted to hear that a) we are still writing and podcasting; and b) there is a wealth of new content since they last visited. When we ask them what caused the assumption of our demise, they invariably cite the fact that our posts disappeared from their Facebook news feeds.

I never had anything like the number of contacts on Facebook that Damn Interesting had, but I had the same experience with people contacting me to ask if I’d given up blogging because none of my posts were showing up in their timelines any more. As more information came out about just how creepy Facebook’s activities are, I stopped even trying to share to that site and eventually stopped linking to any content hosted there. For video credits where the only link for a creator is their FB page, I choose not to make it an active link (although I don’t remove the text). The only use I had after that was for keeping in touch with a few family members who only use that platform, and even that went away after I got locked out of my personal account anyway.

This trend roughly coincides with Facebook’s introduction of “boosting” for pages; in this new model, according to the stats we can see, Facebook stopped showing our posts to approximately 94% of our followers, demanding a fee to “boost” each post into an ad, which would make it visible to more of our audience. We lost contact with tens of thousands of fans practically overnight. We don’t mind paying for a service if it is valuable, but we absolutely don’t want to reach our audience by buying ad space on Facebook. Yuck. But no other option is given to reach the many people who previously followed our posts, and who presumably want to continue to do so.

[…] In a move that feels long overdue, we at Damn Interesting are abandoning all interactions and connections with Facebook.

We really should have done this back when it was revealed that Facebook used the ubiquitous embedded “Like on Facebook” buttons to follow people’s movements around the web without their knowledge or consent.

This bit of belated information prompted me to check the settings on the Share This plug-in I’ve been using for several years and yes, all this time I’ve been inadvertently enabling FB to track anyone on my blog who uses that button (and possibly any other sharing button — that isn’t quite clear). I’ve eliminated that plug-in just in case.

Our reasons for leaving are not entirely abstract. We’re sure many of you, like us, have experienced first-hand how Facebook gives people license to be their worst selves. It can elevate mere differences of political opinion into anger and hostility, pushing friends and family into extreme views, turning loved ones into ugly caricatures of their former selves. Perhaps you have even regretted some of your own posts there; the Facebook interface is designed to make it difficult to engage in good-faith disagreements. It gives undeserved forum to misinformation, disinformation, and hate. Using Facebook has been scientifically demonstrated to cause depression. Facebook subtracts from the quality of the world at a magnitude seldom seen in history, and we’ll all be better off when it goes away.

H/T to Robert Swanson (@WWI) on Gab for the link.

July 6, 2021

GALAXY QUEST – WTF Happened To This Movie?

Filed under: Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

JoBlo Videos
Published 7 Feb 2020

Hollywood has had its fair share of historically troubled productions. Whether it was casting changes, actor deaths, fired directors, in-production rewrites, constant delays, budget cuts or studio edits, these films had every intention to be a blockbuster, but were beset with unforeseen disasters. Sometimes huge hits, sometimes box office bombs.

In our latest episode we explore the 1999 surprise hit GALAXY QUEST, which had a long road to making it to the big screen. Starring Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Sam Rockwell, Tony Shalhoub, Daryl Mitchell, Enrico Colantoni, Justin Long and Missi Pyle, this riff on Star Trek, directed by Dean Parisot, eventually got over its hurdles and made a galactic splash at the box office. Now, if we could just get that sequel …

For more MOVIE NEWS, visit: http://www.joblo.com

#GalaxyQuest #TimAllen #WTFHappenedToThisMovie

March 17, 2021

The long-gone economic framework of print newspapers

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

In The Line, Peter Menzies explains the economic underpinnings of the newspaper world back in the “good old days” before first radio, then TV, and finally the internet took all the profits out of their model:

“Newspaper Boxes” by Randy Landicho is licensed under CC BY 2.0

We will hear a lot in the months ahead about who’s making money from news, so let’s get something straight: Even in the profit-soaked heyday of Canadian newspapers, no one made money from news.

That all ended about 100 years ago when radio — and then television — began delivering it for free.

Oh sure, the occasional ongoing news story would inspire people to buy more newspapers. But in my 30 years in that business the only event that did so in any significant way was the death and funeral of Princess Diana. Even then, after the extra cost of newsprint and distribution, the financial return was insignificant.

But mythologies die hard. People in newsrooms believed news made money — and apparently some still do — even when year after year, surveys of readers showed that there were lots of other things that sold and sustained newspapers.

Some people bought them because they were looking for a job. For others, it was a house, a plumber, a companion, a pet, a car or, really, almost anything else you can think of that might be needed. Classified pages were every town and city’s marketplace. That’s where you found stuff you had to get and bought an ad when you had something to sell or tell people about. It was where you announced the births of your babies, the graduations, engagements and weddings of your children and the deaths of your parents. The lives of communities were recorded in the classified pages of their newspapers.

After a glance at the headlines, many other readers’ first and sometimes only stops were the horoscope, comics, crossword (an error there generated far more calls than a rogue columnist ever could) and other pleasant distractions. For still more, it was the stocks listings, sports scores or recipes to which they were primarily drawn.

There were movie and entertainment listings — even a TV guide so you’d know where and when to find Seinfeld. On Thursdays, you might buy a paper just for the Canadian Tire flyer. On weekends, specialty sections discussed books and told tales of travel adventures well-supported by the latest deals advertised by travel agencies. Housing developers pitched their latest home designs in special real estate sections. And there were magazines. Honestly, there were.

It’s been literal decades since we last subscribed to a print newspaper, and nearly as long since I picked one up from a news stand. My mother is the last person I recall still depending on buying a physical newspaper — she only stopped buying a Saturday Toronto Star in the last year or so — but that was mainly for the TV listings. Back when I still occasionally travelled on business (also more than a decade ago, now), it was a nostalgic treat to find a copy of USA Today at the door of my hotel room in the morning.

February 11, 2021

Tom Brady’s Super Bowl success has outlasted many titans of corporate America

Filed under: Business, Economics, Football, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Despite the headline, this isn’t really about the NFL, Tom Brady or the S*per B*wl, it’s about a key factor in free market economies: creative destruction.

“Blockbuster store closing sale” by Consumerist Dot Com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Consider some of the names that bought Super Bowl airtime during Brady’s first rodeo in January 2002: AOL, Blockbuster, Radio Shack, Circuit City, CompUSA, Sears, Yahoo, VoiceStream Wireless, and Gateway Computers.

The Titans of Yesterday

Notice a theme? That list features some companies we saw in Captain Marvel, the 2019 hit movie that nailed 90s nostalgia and reminded us how fast the world had changed. Like when Blockbuster Video stores were still a thing.

For those who may not recall, when Brady was winning his first Super Bowl, Blockbuster was approaching its peak. In 2004, it operated 9,094 stores and employed some 84,300 people. The company was pulling in $6 billion in revenue annually and looked invincible. Today, a single Blockbuster store remains open — in the world.

Remember RadioShack? Once upon a time, it seemed as if you could find one of their brick-and-mortar stores in every corner of the USA. Not anymore. In 2015, RadioShack filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, in large part because of those many store locations, which cannibalized revenues.

Sears, one of the historic giants of retail, managed to make it to 2018 before announcing its bankruptcy. Its stores continue to close so fast, it’s hard to tell how many remain in operation. (The best guess is about 60.)

It’s sometimes difficult to remember that the titans of industry aren’t always the same companies from year to year, and the sector-dominating company today might well be begging for a bailout (or demanding protection from uppity new competitors) only a few years down the way.

Some might see the collapse of Blockbuster, Sears and company as a sign of something terribly wrong with our economic system. After all, Blockbuster alone paid rent at tens of thousands of properties and employed tens of thousands of workers. Sears was the largest American retailer (by far) for decades.

Watching the companies we once shopped at flounder and fail can be surprising, jarring even. But a closer look shows this cycle is not unusual and is actually the sign of a healthy market economy, not a dysfunctional one. What may seem like pure destruction actually clears the way for economic innovation and renewal. “Creative destruction” is how the economist Joseph Schumpeter (1880-1950) characterized business failure in a free market.

As economist Mark Perry points out, companies on top have a very hard time staying on top. Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise institute and a professor of economics at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus, compared the 1955 Fortune 500 companies to the 2019 Fortune 500. He found that just 52 were still on the list six decades later.

I spent most of my working career in the software business, and many of the companies I’ve worked for over the years aren’t in business any more (my first job out of school was with Northern Telecom … remember them?). Software is a particularly fast-cycling industry, but it’s true of the economy as a whole at a slightly more sedate pace.

February 9, 2021

Tampa Bay quarterback Tom Brady – “What’s not to hate?”

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

I did watch the S*per B*wl on Sunday, although as the Canadian broadcast carefully replaces almost all of the expensive, creative, one-off ads with exactly the same ads the network showed all through the rest of the season, I watched it on my computer, and kept my mute button handy to silence the roughly 2/3rds of the broadcast that wasn’t actually football-related. (Although I’ve read many people commenting that the “special” ads aren’t as good as they used to be, I watch so little TV that I’m hardly qualified to judge personally.) In Monday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh used the old “there’s two kinds of people” device to talk about Tom Brady:

You can easily have an opinion about Brady, and you probably do, even if you’ve never watched a whole football game. But I have no way of predicting what that opinion is. Do you see him as a cheerful, intelligent family man who has transcended his natural limitations through hard work and study? Or is he just the jammiest SOB who ever lived? There was definitely something cruel in watching the immobile Brady dismantle the Chiefs of Patrick Mahomes, a passer equipped with physical gifts whose possibility was inconceivable before he broke into the league.

That’s probably part of how Brady has driven such a fault into North American bedrock. If there were a stat representing handsomeness-to-physical-impressiveness ratio, he would dominate the NFL. When you see photos of young Brady, who famously dropped to the sixth round of the draft, you no longer wonder how he dropped so far but why he was taken at all. Did the scouts fall in love, as they are known to do, with the “good face”?

Ancient Brady is young Brady with less mobility and accuracy. Mostly, like a relief pitcher with nothing but a fastball, he just darts the ball very efficiently at nearby targets. (Trading New England’s targets for Tampa Bay’s was, obviously, shrewd to the point of genius.) He is becoming as specialized, as optimized for one function, as a punter. But in his case the function seems to be “winning Super Bowls,” and we can’t attribute one iota of that to innate gifts denied to ordinary mortals. What’s not to hate?

Speaking of the ads, I do think the Babylon Bee got it exactly right here:

As a comment at Ace of Spades H.Q. related, the S*per B*wl has lost a lot of its cultural capital over the last few years:

49 — I work at a somewhat woke company. While talking about some projects we were working on the new guy asked me “hey why isn’t anyone talking about the superbowl?” and I remembered that even last year everyone was talking about the superbowl none stop the monday after.

Well you’ve finally done it lefties you’ve killed the NFL.
Posted by: 18-1

I tuned out the halftime show, even though the performer was kinda-sorta a local boy (born in Toronto), and I was a bit nonplussed with the visuals (I had the whole thing muted, natch). James Lileks found the show to be oddly reminiscent of 70’s SciFi movies:

The halftime show had a strange 70s sci-fi aesthetic; for some reason I kept thinking of The Black Hole and Logan’s Run. The most interesting part was picking out the buildings in the New York skyline arrayed in neon. Ah, it’s the AT&T Building, Philip Johnson’s famous po-mo Chippendale tower! And that would be the Met Life tower, which is actually the base for a much-larger tower unbuilt after the Crash of ’29. Hey, everyone, let’s pause this elaborate routine and destroy its momentum so I can wax pedantic!

Then there were all those dancers in masks, looking like victims of surgery in an old movie where a gangster got plastic surgery. A way of incorporating the pandemic zeitgeist, right? Last year: EMPOWERMENT AND SEX AND SEX EMPOWERMENT! This year: faceless people moving in mass to choreographed steps, then dissolving into random panic. There was something wrong about it, like some dank gas blown up through a fissure, filling balloons that looked like the humans who populate the shadows of a nightmare.

Previous years, the Super Bowl event was pure excess — mad, crass, exuberant, American overdrive, American overkill, a mix of skill and brute force. Something about this one felt desperate and shellshocked. I suppose I’m reading too much into it. But I don’t think we need fever dreams and worried-looking buskers in empty fields, at this point. It would be nice just to have some Clydesdales again.

I saw on another site (sorry, forgotten where I noticed it) that the bandages were an in-joke for The Weeknd’s fans, who’d been teased with several social media posts about him recovering from some sort of mysterious plastic surgery procedure leading up to the performance.

October 29, 2020

How to fix the CBC

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

… aside from cutting off the massive subsidies from the federal government, which would be my preferred solution if “nuke it from orbit” isn’t a viable choice. Let it sink or swim as a purely private media entity — I’d be betting on the “sink”, personally because they don’t currently have to compete thanks to their funding from the feds and are not noted for their quick adaptation skills. However, Peter Menzies isn’t quite as anti-CBC as I am:

In a recent piece here at The Line, I lamented the current status of the CBC. That’s easy enough to do, but it’s fair to ask what can actually be done to fix it. These ideas don’t provide all the answers but, implemented with conviction and speed, here’s where to start. Because there are some things that can be done, and relatively quickly, to revitalize the institution: the CBC may well be hell-bent on its own destructive dualism but clarifying its role and purifying its soul are still possible by getting it out of the advertising business and turning it into a proper public media.

Right now, the CBC is neither fish nor fowl. Sometimes, as with radio, it is a popular public broadcaster. At others, with its television channels, it fancies itself a commercial broadcaster, albeit a publicly-funded and relatively unpopular one. It plows both of those personalities into its commercial online operations and supplements them with reportage of the kind traditionally associated with newspapers. Like a creature of mythology, it shape-shifts through all of these roles as best suits its needs and moods.

On top of that, its OMG obsession with Trump’s America has drawn it far away from its content mandate to ensure Canadians learn about each other wherever they live in this vast and beautiful country. While its performance indicates otherwise, CBC’s purpose is not to secure a large audience share in the GTA or, in French, in Montreal, in order to earn more revenue. Nor is CBC News Network’s mandate to compete with CNN. The Corp’s raison d’etre, as defined in legislation, is to tell Canadians each other’s stories — even if the GTA and Montreal don’t care.

The only way to purify the CBC then, is to ban it — once and for all — from collecting advertising revenue from domestic consumption of its product. As its radio operations are already advertising-free this means no more ads on its TV or websites. Done. Finished.

QotD: The art of the politician

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Politics, it has been said (by me, I think), is the art of the hardly possible. One demands, or promises, things that cannot be delivered in this world, and that no one could want if they thought through the consequences. The successful politician does not lie, except when cornered. Rather, he fantasizes, “dreams,” and seeks a constituency that will dream with him. To my mind, Barack Obama was near to the perfect politician, and while lacking his class and cunning, Canada’s child prime minister, “Justine” (see the 4,000-page novel by the Marquis de Sade), has attempted to offer the same billboard attractions. It is what all modern capitalism has aspired to: nothing, in a very spiffy package; a triumph of pure advertising.

The perfect politician, as the perfect salesman, sells this “vision” — dwarfing any specific programme with its stated assumptions and checkable facts. Details, details; to the uninitiated, these are always boring, and the voting masses will never be initiated. The people, especially in this Age of Netflix, want entertainment, and what they call “leadership.” A leader is a person who does your thinking for you. In politics, he has a rôle like that of film director, in a movie where he will be the principal star. We must go through the movie emotionally on his side; grieve his little setbacks, feel that we participate when he wins. Black hats, white hats: his opponents are clearly marked and can be seen at every moment to be deplorable.

David Warren, “Now playing”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-07-13.

September 20, 2020

The CBC’s latest bit of “mission creep”

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

At The Line, Jen Gerson wonders what the hell the CBC thinks it’s doing with this move:

Let us take a moment to leverage a little credibility under the CBC’s ass.

What the fuck is the CBC playing at, here? The corporation receives a cool $1 billion in public funding per year and it’s using taxpayer funds to, yet again, horn into the revenue streams of private communications outlets. No one — literally not a single Canadian taxpayer who isn’t already employed by the CBC — wants to throw money at a public broadcaster so that it can: “Help Canada’s strongest brands shape and share inspiring stories across our platforms and across the country.” Vomit.

No one asked for a taxpayer-funded advertising firm, you goddamn loons.

This is yet another classic example of one of the most dysfunctional habits of the MotherCorp: mission creep. A massive and rudderless operation unfettered from the practical limitations of profit-seeking has proven itself unable to restrain its own boneheaded impulses.

We, at The Line, can hear the pitiable defences already: “Oh, but they’re already underfunded. Of course they need to, uh, use their incredible taxpayer-funded competitive advantage to eat into the dwindling revenue streams of failing private media outlets just to survive!”

No. No. No they do not.

When faced with a dysfunctional hydra-headed cultural behemoth that is demonstrably incapable of keeping its mandate in its pants, the first impulse should not be to shovel ever-more taxpayer funds into the ever-widening maw. The CBC could respond to *cough* “inadequate funding” by narrowing its scope and focus to the things that make it most necessary to the Canadian public that it serves — radio, news, documentary, serving regions and topics that the private sector cannot adequately penetrate. Instead it goes off and does weird shit like this, and CBC Comedy, and CBC Music.

CBC. Guys.

You cannot be everything to everyone. You shouldn’t be everything to everyone. Canadians are not well served by a monopolistic government-funded one-stop #content communications shop. Figure out what you do best and stick to it. Focus on supplementing — rather than crushing — private-sector journalism. Maybe even consider ways to support private-sector start ups and independents, especially in local markets. “Revenue generation” is not the place where a public broadcaster should demonstrate self-defeating, industry-following innovation.

August 12, 2020

QotD: The circle of recycled life

Filed under: Business, Economics, Environment, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

1. Somewhere in this great land, a concerned and responsible corporation is having their twice-weekly colorful and compelling advertising supplement printed on 100% recycled paper.

2. As soon as they are completed millions of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements are shipped by truck to the various regional receiving centers of the U.S. Post Office.

3. From those centers, any number of allocated pallets of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements are broken out, put on U.S. Post Office trucks and delivered to local postal carrier destinations inside northern California.

4. My personal Paradise postal carrier and hundreds of others report for work at local postal carrier centers throughout northern California and load up their vans with enough of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements to deliver one or more to each and every house on their route.

5. My very polite personal Paradise postal carrier parks her van at the end of my block and loads her sack with these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements.

6. She comes up my walk, up the porch stairs, and deposits my full share of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements into my mailbox with a clang every day between one and three in the afternoon.

7. Hearing the clang I sigh and wend my weary way to the front door and open my mailbox and pluck out said colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements.

8. With a heavier sigh I go back in, trudge through my house, out my back door to the alley, and place the colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements into my Recycling bin with the rest of the week’s mound.

9. Tomorrow the huge, lumbering Paradise Waste Management Recycling garbage truck will stop and empty my Recycling bin into its maw and haul all the colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements off to the Chico California Recycling and Brand New Mountain of Garbage center.

10. The collected colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements will then be shipped, by truck, to the center for turning recyclable paper into … recycled paper which will then be used by a concerned and responsible corporation for their twice-weekly colorful and compelling advertising supplements printed on 100% recycled paper.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Next year, as sure as spring brings septic system failures to Paradise, postage will increase because the U.S. Postal Colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements “Service” will need more money to keep The Recycled Circle of life going.

Gerard VanderLeun, “The Circle of Recycled Life”, American Digest, 2018-06-01.

July 16, 2020

QotD: The young Herbert Hoover

Filed under: Business, Education, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Herbert Hoover was born in 1874 to poor parents in the tiny Quaker farming community of West Branch, Iowa. His father was a blacksmith, his mother a schoolteacher. His childhood was strict. Magazines and novels were banned; acceptable reading material included the Bible and Prohibitionist pamphlets. His hobby was collecting oddly shaped sticks.

His father died when he is 6, his mother when he is 10. The orphaned Hoover and his two siblings are shuttled from relative to relative. He spends one summer on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma, living with an uncle who worked for the Department of Indian Affairs. Another year passes on a pig farm with his Uncle Allen. In 1885, he is more permanently adopted by his Uncle John, a doctor and businessman helping found a Quaker colony in Oregon. Hoover’s various guardians are dutiful but distant; they never abuse or neglect him, but treat him more as an extra pair of hands around the house than as someone to be loved and cherished. Hoover reciprocates in kind, doing what is expected of him but excelling neither in school nor anywhere else.

In his early teens, Hoover gets his first job, as an office boy at a local real estate company. He loves it! He has spent his whole life doing chores for no pay, and working for pay is so much better! He has spent his whole life sullenly following orders, and now he’s expected to be proactive and figure things out for himself! Hoover the mediocre student and all-around unexceptional kid does a complete 180 and accepts Capitalism as the father he never had.

His first task is to write some newspaper ads for Oregon real estate. He writes brilliant ads, ads that draw people to Oregon from every corner of the country. But he learns some out-of-towners read his ads, come to town, stay at hotels, and are intercepted by competitors before they negotiate with his company. Of his own initiative, he rents several houses around town and turns them into boarding houses for out-of-towners coming to buy real estate, then doesn’t tell his competitors where they are. Then he marks up rent on the boarding houses and makes a tidy profit on the side. Everything he does is like this. When an especially acrimonious board meeting threatens to split the company, a quick-thinking Hoover sneaks out and turns off the gas to the building, plunging the meeting into darknes. Everyone else has to adjourn, the extra time gives cooler heads a change to prevail, and the company is saved. Everything he does is like this.

(on the other hand, he has zero friends and only one acquaintance his own age, who later describes him to biographers as “about as much excitement as a china egg”.)

Hoover meets all sorts of people passing through the Oregon frontier. One is a mining engineer. He regales young Herbert with his stories of traveling through the mountains, opening up new sources of minerals to feed the voracious appetite of Progress. This is the age of steamships, skyscrapers, and railroads, and to the young idealistic Hoover, engineering has an irresistible romance. He wants to leave home and go to college. But he worries a poor frontier boy like him would never fit in at Harvard or Yale. He gets a tip – a new, tuition-free university might be opening in Palo Alto, California. If he heads down right away, he might make it in time for the entrance exam. Hoover fails the entrance exam, but the new university is short on students and decides to take him anyway.

Herbert Hoover is the first student at Stanford. Not just a member of the first graduating class. Literally the first student. He arrives at the dorms two months early to get a head start on various money-making schemes, including distributing newspapers, delivering laundry, tending livestock, and helping other students register. He would later sell some of these businesses to other students and start more, operating a constant churn of enterprises throughout his college career. His academics remain mediocre, and he continues to have few friends – until he tries out for the football team in sophomore year. He has zero athletic talent and fails miserably, but the coach (whose eye for talent apparently transcends athletics) spots potential in Hoover and asks him to come on as team manager. In this role, Hoover is an unqualified success. He turns the team’s debt into a surplus, and starts the Big Game – a UC Berkeley vs. Stanford football match played on Thanksgiving which remains a beloved Stanford football tradition.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.

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