Climate change, climate confusion. No snow at Christmas. The land was all khaki, brown and shades of defeated green — as if swaddled in military camouflage for a Christo spectacular. Someone must have been dreaming of a white spring. A snowstorm last Wednesday night knocked out the lights an hour before midnight and the darkness got deeper and icier until valiant linemen battling wind and snowdrifts brought them back just after dawn. If this year’s hares — rabbits, jackrabbits — look oddly like mule deer in the pictures, that is because a kind offer to stand in for the missing animals was accepted immediately. Strict traditionalists can scroll down for an instant’s relief from climatic disorientation.
By becoming a shareholder in an acting and theatre-owning joint-stock company, Shakespeare — a ‘country boy’ outsider — ‘was the first to turn playmaking into a potentially rewarding profession’ — Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate
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A live scroll of 3,700 readers’ comments on U.K. taxation and a comment invitation box on the 6 March home page of the online Daily Mail look like illustrations for William Dutton’s The Fifth Estate: The Power Shift of the Digital Age
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Real-life counterparts of conceptions of things to come can appear in unlikely places, including some in the past.
But, you may say — surely not the online Daily Mail coupled to the Chinese user-videos-plus-shopping platform, TikTok? Yes, and yes. But also from, of all people, the supreme William Shakespeare — or what literary experts and historians searching for the indisputable facts about his life have unearthed in recent decades.
Though legacy media’s need for an innovative financing scheme and structure has proceeded from dire to desperate, this has somehow gone unmentioned in 2024’s mournful stream of reports about the decimation of employment in the news business.
In noting that over five hundred jobs in U.S. print, broadcast and digital media fell to cost-cutters’ axes in January, Politico said that this followed layoffs of 3,087 in the same categories in 2023 and 2020’s high watermark of 16,060. A 5 March reminder in the Financial Times of 450 journalists losing their jobs in Britain’s dominant Reach publishing conglomerate last year — because of an advertising slump linked to a steep slide in its newspapers’ online reader numbers — was not accompanied by any discussion or speculation about ways to stop or reverse the trend. Legacy publishers exhibit no outward signs of interest in remedies except for tried and tired variations of subscription terms or experiments in taking paywalls up or down to limit what visitors to their sites can read.
The New Year’s Day post here drew attention to the lone, faint glimmer in this doom-saturated panorama: old media managers do at last understand that reader-commenters are poised to become the core of their economic survival plans — the same people at the heart of the keiretsu-cooperative.
These are the visitors — effectively, informal, indie micro-publishers — luring and engaging site traffic who in 2010 were still commonly referred to as ‘bloggers’. January’s p-Gjottings about them recorded that the business brains at some newspapers have begun to treat reader-commenters’ reactions and other ‘content’ like gold dust. As a result, some of them have begun — shamefully — to slap copyright claims with no legal justification onto those contributions from audience members, including many who are handing over cash as site subscribers.
How long is it going to take before most of them understand all the transformations underway sufficiently to see that reader-commenters are well on their way to morphing into:
— CONVERSATION PARTNERS ON EQUAL TERMS
or ‘interactive’ audiences who are no longer mere receivers for broadcasts by newspaper reporters and opinion writers. On 6 March, anyone popping in at the online Daily Mail would have noticed an apparent experiment — placing at the centre of its home page a blank commenting box inviting readers to have their say on the U.K. government’s spring taxation and budget announcement.
This invitation was set in a screen within a screen with a moving scroll of other readers’ thoughts on the topic (see screenshot above, taken when the comment count had reached 3,700).
The overall impression was of a live demo of William Dutton’s portrayals in The Fifth Estate(2023) of ‘networked individuals’ becoming powerful as ‘a new source of accountability, not only in government and politics but also in all sectors of society.’
— CO-PERFORMERS
The online Daily Mail is the world’s fifth most-popular English language news title. It also magnetises more visitors to TikTok than any other purveyor of news on this Chinese-owned (ByteDance) social media platform where anyone can upload short videos they have made; earn cash from advertisers through product placements and promotions if they can lure enough traffic; and buy things hawked to them.
Publishing for people catching up on news where they go for relief from boredom, to play amateur auteur or entrepreneur, or to risk becoming shopaholics looks unavoidably like the future of journalism — because these people are disproportionately the youngest adults.
In a mid-January feather-fluffing announcement, the Daily Mail Online claimed to have ‘surpassed 10 million followers’ on TikTok (estimated by backlinko.com, to have soared beyond X-Twitter, Telegram, Reddit, Pinterest and Snapchat in platform popularity measured by ‘monthly active users.’)
The paper summed up its TikTok triumph as icing on the cake for its ‘unrivalled position as no.1 for engagement with audiences across all platforms.’ It explained that ‘[a]ccording to research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 20 per cent of 18-24s use TikTok to learn about current events, which was an increase of five percentage points from the previous year.’ A follow-up story in February quoted other research ‘showing that more than 40 per cent of 18-24s receive news from the Chinese-owned social media giant once or more times a day, compared with 19 per cent for the BBC, Instagram (44 per cent), Facebook (33 per cent) and Elon Musk‘s X (24 per cent), formerly known as Twitter.’
Luck being what luck is, my 2010 outline of a scheme for post-Gutenberg publishing, six years before the birth of TikTok, began:
New communication technologies have created a karaoke world. It is not just that we have the means to ensure, cheaply and easily, that—as Andy Warhol predicted— everyone could be world-famous for fifteen minutes … Practically nobody is content any more to be just a spectator, reader, passive listener or viewer. Audience participation as well as the right to talk back—which includes non-expert reviewing of works or performances by trained and seasoned professionals—have become absolutely standard expectations.
— STAKEHOLDERS AND CO-DETERMINISTS
Few card-carrying cultural elitists inclined to shrug loftily about TikTokers earning cash from homespun, unmediated webcasting — making them de facto stakeholders in the platform’s success — will know that without the democratisation of culture in his own revolutionary epoch, we would never have heard of William Shakespeare. That man of mystery incommensurably more gifted than any other literary genius — forget TikTokers — has emerged from recent literary and historical sleuthing not as the aristocrat lurking behind a pseudonym in the centuries-old rumour, but incontestably a ‘country boy.’
He was ‘the grandson of a yeoman farmer and the son of a failed provincial shopkeeper,’ in his portrait by today’s pre-eminent Shakespearean scholar, Jonathan Bate, in Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare(2009). He got his start in playwriting by polishing the scripts of other writers while enduring mockery as ‘an upstart crow,’ a ‘rude groom,’ and a ‘peasant.’
But this book’s most unexpected revelation, for many, will be about Shakespeare’s business acumen, an asset as rare in writers then as it is now. He died a prosperous landowner at fifty-two, leaving his wife and the children he had fathered before his twenty-first birthday well provided for from his earnings as a shareholder in an acting company that operated very like a cross between an artists’ collective and a cooperative venture in our time.
Through becoming a shareholder, Shakespeare was the first to turn play-making into a potentially rewarding profession that could support a marriage and a family. His fortune was made not by a literary innovation but by a business decision. In his early career, Shakespeare would have noted the raw deal suffered by the script writers, who were paid only a few pounds per play. The serious money was made by manager Henslowe and lead actor Alleyn, who ran the Rose Theatre as an entrepreneurial partnership. Shakespeare and his close associates came up with an alternative arrangement: the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was formed in 1594 as a joint-stock company, with the profits shared among the players.
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What could have been the equivalent of reader-commenter power for Shakespearean audiences?
The 20th-century historian John Hale has shown that unlike the ‘patron-fostered painters of Italy, the Low Countries and Germany,’ the Bard ‘was reliant on popular support, as were his fellow playwrights.’ Their works and the venues for their performances were part of a democratically inclined ‘theatrical machinery that both responded to and increased the number of spectators and dramatists.’ Another impression from reading The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance is of how uncannily today’s social media frenzy resembles the explosion in early 17th-century mass entertainment in London:
During the boom period of new plays, 1600-10 … the places available each year in the commercial theatre, discounting Sundays and Lent, may have topped a staggering two million when the population of London was two hundred and fifty thousand. Never before in Europe had there been so heavy a vote of confidence in a single form of cultural activity.
In another prefiguring of the present, Civilization shows the joys of expanding free expression for playwrights soon proving to be too much for the authorities:
Altogether the appetite for theatrical dialogue and effects was so constant as to enable a playwright to indulge his own aspirations short of flagrantly inviting political and religious censorship; bawdiness was let slip with a shrug, a contributory reason for the Puritan criticism which led eventually, in 1642, to the order that the theatres should be closed altogether, an order honoured almost as much in the breach as in the observance.
Some of the Puritans especially disgusted by their inability to control this tide in public affairs presumably let a different one carry them away to found a new colony on the other side of the sea. But here we are now, being reminded that the most satisfying narrative arcs can turn out to be circles.
The keiretsu-cooperative seems to rhyme naturally with what has gone before, not just with what will or should be.
The tiger mural is a reminder that our most ordinary actions, from shopping to pumping fuel ( above and below ) are being included in data-gathering for AI everywhere. In an old Chinese philosophical text, tigers spy with ‘sharp eyes’ — the official name of China’s nationwide surveillance system
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The Wikipedia uses this painting by Hieronymus Bosch to illustrate its explanation of misdirection. Frogs leaping from the mouth of the victim having his pocket picked by the conjurer’s accomplice mock his foolishness
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Hello froggy.
Happy New Year!
Before I get to frog ponds — or another way to think of comments sections of newspapers and other media sites — let’s think about where we are on this road to a world run on AI. What’s being done to commenters couldn’t be more emblematic.
No I’m not addressing you as a twitchy amphibian to be rude. I’m a frog too. We all are. Frogs clueless for the most part about the heat being turned up under this pot of water we’ve been put in ever so gently, as the dial twists by infinitesimal degrees. Or not so oblivious, but lying to ourselves about what is happening because truth is frightening when we don’t know how to defend ourselves against its implications.
What truth is that? you ask. This: in digital technology’s reshaping of society, we have gone far beyond the surveillance business model (or ‘surveillance capitalism’ if you are politically-minded) to losing our human agency — which is, being deprived of our ability to act on our intentions, or do freely what we reasonably expect to be able to. Or did.
Pay attention to what the most objective leading scientists are saying. Not the elite compromised by still working in or closely connected to technology giants, investors and startups. Not anyone taking Big Tech’s coin in research funding at their universities — the subject of a recent report in the Washington Post — unless they are as honest as the Belgian physicist Bob Coecke. He taught at Oxford for over twenty years and lately, has been doing all he can for emergency public education. In an interview with a Guardian journalist published two weeks ago he said, too bluntly for delicate ears:
‘Think about AI. Think about how the world is getting fucked up now. Billion-dollar companies are in charge of a revolution that could control the world and nobody understands what they are doing.’
Note his use of the present tense, dear froggy. Treat as singing with forked tongues the chorus of alarmism about AI dangers from too many sci-tech stars. Note that their warnings are focused on the future — with no mention of damage being done by AI in the present, in which fortunes are being made by some of those alarmists as they themselves exploit the all-invading technology (last mentioned in a post here in June.)
It’s hard to shake off the impression that the persistent future-focus is being used exactly like the ancient magician’s art of theatrical misdirection. A stream of deceptive patter from the conjurer concentrates on what he wants the audience to look at while he grabs the diversion to play his tricks and pull off his stunts.
How do you demonstrate that we are losing human agency? O froggy, o froggy, the proof that we’re frogs set for boiling is all around us in the trivia of daily life. It looks boring beside the futurist-conjurers’ high-flown speculations about AI becoming ‘conscious,’ and their arguments about what that what would mean.
You can trace an arc of horror from a New York Times exposé five years ago to a recent leak about Google’s objective in its nonstop data collection on, and analysis of us as individuals. In 2019 Kashmir Hill, a NYT reporter, discovered that Sifted, a company specialising in data-gathering, was a top purveyor of detailed personal profiles of consumers that other companies buy to decide on discriminatory treatment. How long you are kept on hold as you wait for customer support. Or when you have to return a defective product you have bought, make that task easy, arduous or impossible.
This is all done automatically by software, early AI or machine intelligence, based on your very personal Sifted profiling and categorisation, which can include — as the NYT journalist discovered — ten years of comments that you posted on some website. Rating like this could account for some cases in a Guardianreport on 19 December about the frantic struggles of UK telecommunications customers attempting to cancel broadband contracts. One said that he could not get anyone to help him on his telecoms company’s web chat service ‘after leaving it open all day for two consecutive days,’ — after which he spent hours on hold seeking help by telephone, during which he was disconnected four times.
Who could expect any of this to get better after considering the implications of these Daily Mail gleanings from documents presented at a recent internal conference at Google describing ‘the tech giant’s plan to create an artificial intelligence designed to become its users’ “Life Story Teller”’ — software anyone could open for the first time and discover that ‘“it already knows everything about your life.’’’
As people paying attention know by now, dear froggy, the technologists say that they are only following digital technology where it is leading us unavoidably. Before the wide public debate that this rationalisation needs — urgently, members of the public have to open their eyes wide to their frogs-in-pot predicament.
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My own enlightenment came from thinking about roughly a decade of reading and commenting on the website of the Financial Times, a newspaper to which I have had fond, work-related ties going back to three weeks before I turned twenty-one, a whole geological era ago. I mention this because feeling the temperature go up in the frog water on that site, and realising that commenter-frogs are no longer in a pond but a confining pot — thanks to sweeping changes in the online FT’s management practices — is especially unnerving for those of us who knew the paper in its still recent, pre-digital past.
In spite of the annoyance of trigger-happy site moderators, the first few years of media commenting sites, from approximately the mid-noughties, were glorious fun. Very happy frog ponds. On the websites where I tried out commenting — or unmediated publishing — it was startling to see readers hopping in and out at any hour of day or night, frequently posting links to their personal blogs and websites. We started our own, separate conversations in those places. Some of us went on to exchange news about our families as a matter of course.
The Financial Times site was not one of my early commenting ponds. Perhaps because it was already behind a paywall in 2016, and because a large proportion of its readers’ subscriptions are paid for by their expense accounts, the conversations there are less relaxed — if more reliably intelligent. But it was enough like the sites where I learnt how commenting works that I have been alarmed by registering signs of readers being treated over the years less like cherished visitors and more and more like data-collection objects (or dupes): instances adding up to froggy water warming up steadily but barely noticeably.
This includes introducing barriers to commenters’ ability to save their own published comments and the rest of the commenter thread — the context in which they were made.
It used to be possible to save any article with its entire comment thread in a single sequence of clicks. That is now only a sad memory.
— Rearranging the orderin which comments were actually posted in thread-saves, along with severely restricting the number of comments downloadable in a single cut-and-paste exercise. This is not merely frustrating but distorts the historical record, which matters to those of us — including scholars — who study for instance, the ebb and flow of sentiment on particular topics in the threads. Declarations of support for positions that oppose the paper’s politics can simply be eliminated from comment-rations.
— Stamping with an FT.com ownership (copyright) noticeany saved commentcontributed to the commons by readers writing to and for each other, a valuable public resource — even though we legally own the copyright to our own sentences and paragraphs.
— Discouraging commentersfrom getting to know each other.
In the first of the series of redesigns of FT.com witnessed by me since 2016 — including changes in the management of the site and policies affecting reader-commenters — subscribers stopped receiving detailed email notifications of replies to our comments as well as of any new comment in a thread if we had opted to be sent these. The e-notices had until then been delivered with copies of all the sentences to which a fellow-reader was responding; the whole text of any reply, as well as the screen name of the responder.
All these added immensely to the joys of commenting, especially for anyone like me far less interested in how many replies or recommendations my comments earn than in the screen identity of the recommender. In experiences on other sites, some responses were the start of exceptionally rewarding friendships. Being able to judge how active a thread was from new post alerts helped to decide timing for adding contributions to discussions or just larking around. The alerts often cheered up my email inbox on days when it was clogged with depressing subjects.
Since the policy shift, all we receive is a flag about a reply from a particular screen name. Nothing more. Another alteration introduced in those early years removed the ability to address a single comment to several screen names in a thread.
Why did the site managers do this? As they do not answer questions about their motives, you have to guess for yourself. Far from encouraging friendships and symphysis, the site operators are seemingly worried about the possibility of collective action by readers in any policy disagreement with management.
The overriding motive for switching to bare-bones email notices was obvious: to force commenters to return to the site as often as possible — to increase the click count used to attract advertisers, and to allow data collection. As almost everyone now knows, each twitch of our cursors, every placement of our clicks and even clues to our changing moods are being recorded and added to our profiles. Sparing us the need to return and log in again would mean giving up chances to fatten these data hoards.
— Blocking site visitors who pay to attend forums and other online events from using the privacy-preserving Safari browser to participate, and insisting that they use Chrome.
This happened to me after I had bought my ticket for one event. It took a time-wasting appeal to upper management to get my money back.
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Because I put commenters at front and centre stage in my discussion brief for the Oxford Internet Institute in 2010, I have not been surprised to find comments being treated like precious metals — even if I couldn’t have guessed that this would have anything to do with data gathering for detailed profiling of citizens. Grist for the LLMs that are the mills of AI.
If further confirmation of the soaring value of the pearls of wisdom or pigeon-droppings in readers’ contributions were needed, it could be in a report last month that Chinese authorities are stigmatizing as mentally ill website visitors who read comments but seldom or never write any. Not altogether a shock, if true, when you consider that the Chinese have always had their own ways of going about compelling cooperation, and their AI mills are no less avid for everyone’s thoughts and feelings. It looks as if someone ordained that the psychological profiles of refuseniks must not be permitted to have holes.
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I posted a comment on FT.com last summer about my fear that we are on our way to a hot, wet extinction by bain-marie beneath an article about AI. A reader using @Useparagraphsplease for a screen ID was delighted to remind me that in the famous experiment my metaphor came from, all the frogs were able to escape alive and unhurt.
But froggy dear, that took awareness and determined preventative action, which is my dearest hope for our species at the start of a new year.
Love,
p-G
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Note: Readers of this post who feel that any criticism in it is unfair or inaccurate are invited to leave a comment (which will not be published until after its spambot check). Or, write to me directly at postgutenberg[at]gmail.com.
They are out there and high up a long way from the electricity grid, the inspirations for the artificial indoor lights of this season. They are there just as art is — for art’s sake, and no reason we can discern by reasoning. The man-made tributes to them, no matter how ingenious and beautiful, look pointless when considered beside the originals — which can seem to demand that you acknowledge them, as Jupiter beaming into a kitchen window did in 2022 when it came closer to earth than it had for fifty-nine years and dwarfed the rest of the constellation ( top ). It was an irresistible presence in the night sky for months. Vital indoor tasks were dropped to make records of its nearness, and these went directly into a file of personal astronomical treasures which also contains a haiku-like poem for the eyes from earlier this year: a half-moon in a cloudless blue yonder ( scroll all the way down past the moon shining on ponderosa branches ).
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If only Robert Frost were alive to ask why he singled out China for special mention in setting down a universal truism. (Was it a reference to Chinese philosophy?) In all other ways this poem below, better-suited to a snowless, warm, El Niño Christmas than any carol, is perfect. It is transcendent in spite of its author’s famous insistence on plainer, conversational versifying and in a different poem, preference for terra firma — ‘Earth’s the right place for love/ I don’t know where it is likely to go better.’
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On Looking Up By Chance At The Constellations
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You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves —
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
It is true the longest drought will end in rain,
The longest peace in China will end in strife.
Still it wouldn’t reward the watcher to stay awake
post-Gutenberg 