Category Archives: Business models for publishing

The let’s-hear-from-everyone media revolution needs Elon Musk as much as he needs Twitter. His guides would be Robert Oppenheimer, Michelangelo and King Crimson

. Big Tech, Social media, Business models for publishing, Cooperatives, Culture after Gutenberg, Keiretsu-cooperative, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , , , , , , , , ,

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Should Elon switch species to a different, less complacent-looking bird for Twitter?

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Musk focuses on what intrigues him as intently as a foraging woodpecker. He is studying an antique Samurai sword here during a 2018 podcast interview with Joe Rogan

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[ 14.10. 2022 A quotation of an article on the Intelligencer site has been corrected for errors of transcription. ** ]

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There could be no one better equipped to run Twitter for the public good than Elon Musk. Not that the link between past and present evidence of this is obvious. His exploits in space transport and electric cars have virtually eclipsed his beginnings as a pioneering new media entrepreneur. Riding on the slogan ‘We Power the Press,’ his maiden venture, Zip2 — a collaboration with his brother Kimbal — sold specialised software that helped US newspapers to dip their toes in the internet in 1995. Customers included The New York Times.

At the end of last month, a quarter-century later, Musk restored uncensored internet access to Iranians being blocked from posting, for instance, video records of police brutality. Deploying satellite technology in an unexpected caped-crusader move on their behalf, he created a communication alternative for citizens fighting steadily tightening state control through surveillance and personal data collection tied to digital identity cards unavoidable in using public health services, or buying rail or plane tickets.

Musk, more than any other technologist or legacy media operator, could engineer exactly the right transformation of mass communication. This will mean letting unmediated and dissenting voices compete with legacy publishing on less unequal terms without destroying what is best in the Fourth Estate tradition — a balancing act that is a crucial preoccupation of this website.

Musk could actually reshape Twitter expressly to democratise media, as he said he hoped to in April:

Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is important to the future of civilisation. […] Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square … It’s really important that people … are able to speak freely, in the bounds of the law.

He could supercharge the evolution of the complacent, smug-looking Twitter bird into an energetic woodpecker pecking apart any anti-social old media cliques, and disrupting their instinctive, tacit collusion — rather than active conspiring, I suspect — in only informing the public about what suits their interests and those of their allies and financial supporters, which now include Big Tech.

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The scheme for phasing out the advertising-centred ‘business model’ for publishing with which this  post-Gutenberg.com (pG) site began eleven years ago aimed to correct that unfortunate tendency towards centralised control and throttling freedom of expression.

Unlike some high-profile attempts at new media creation — for instance, Truth Social and WT Social, started from scratch by a former U.S. president and a Wikipedia co-founder, respectively, at opposite ends of the political spectrum — pG’s proposal of a hybrid keiretsu-cooperative structure would grow new branches and leaves on existing rootstock.

Any significant transformation — however sensitively designed to calm the loss-of-status anxieties of old media — has to be led by an extrovert able to take it from a blueprint to a practical solution for the 21st century. That is certainly not this writer. I was surprised when certain reflexively sceptical thinkers approved of the keiretsu-cooperative’s logic instantaneously, when I sketched its outlines for them in December 2009. I was dispatched to William Dutton, the founder-director of the Oxford Internet Institute, who invited me to set down my proposal for publication as a discussion brief at the start of 2010.

In 2022, the ideas it blends together turn out to be remarkably like those of Elon Musk and some of his keenest supporters — notably, Mathias Döpfner’s. He is chief executive and part-owner of Europe’s largest mass media conglomerate, Axel Springer SE. In March, he texted Musk to say —

Why don’t you buy Twitter? We run it for you. And establish a true platform of free speech.Would be a real contribution to democracy.

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Here are four reasons why Elon Musk could succeed in turning Twitter into something like a keiretsu-cooperative. They might seem a little odd, at first glance:

1. What physicists know about the foundations of the material world — in particular, ‘wave-particle duality’ — supports Musk’s belief that Twitter should be the equivalent of a town square equally open to voices from the political left and right

This correspondence between basic physics and politics occurred to Robert Oppenheimer — the so-called father of the atomic bomb — in the middle of the last century. It would be surprising if Musk, who studied economics and physics at university, did not know about the parallel he drew. 

A British physicist and decoder of Oppenheimer’s thinking, Brian Cox, has testified to the mental struggle of physics undergraduates confronting the bizarre truth that a single atomic particle at the core of seemingly solid material reality sometimes resembles a tiny billiard ball or marble; at others, is most like a water wave on the surface of a pond: ‘Neither description of it is absolutely right or absolutely wrong. They are both necessary.’ 

Just as fundamental science rules out absolutism, Cox has explained, Oppenheimer believed ‘it also has no place in politics or human affairs. It is a dead end.’ The American physicist-philosopher arrived at this conclusion in grappling with the dire, incommensurable weight on his conscience of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Recognising that he had given politics and politicians the power to blow up the whole world, he called for rejecting You’re either for us or against us absolutism in favour of complementarity. 

Almost like a poet, the exceptionally well- and widely-read Oppenheimer spoke in 1953 of ‘the life of the human spirit’ far more abundant than the ‘wealth and variety’ of physics or indeed all the natural sciences; ‘enriched by complementary, not at once compatible ways, irreducible to one another,’ and even so, part of ‘a greater harmony.’ 

2. Musk understands the new media platforms thoroughly from a user’s perspective — and is clearly addicted to Twitter, to which he could owe the vastness of his fortune 

A thoughtful long article on Intelligencer asserts that cannily calculated, massively escalated tweeting has been explosively enriching for him. Though he could be short-changing the Tesla chief’s engineering instincts — possibly, genius — the profiler, Lane Brown, is at least semi-persuasive when he says,

It’s hard to fathom how somebody could make more money faster than anyone ever has by tweeting, yet that’s pretty much what happened: A carrot was dangled, and Musk, likely figuring he would never reach it on the basis of such old-fashioned metrics as quarterly earnings, yoked Tesla’s stock to his Twitter feed and went goblin mode. A little like when Neo from The Matrix realized that reality was a mirage and therefore he could do kung fu without any lessons, Musk intuited the illusory nature of the stock market and social media and ran up a new all-time-high score. If Tesla might have been a $300 billion company under a generic Silicon Valley CEO, it was a $1.2 trillion company with the guy who turned it into a product cult.

3. He could afford to be one of those great revolutionaries who succeed wildly before they fail — on their way to a possible, grand, posthumous triumph 

For example: Einstein, much-quoted for saying that most of his ‘intellectual offspring end up very young in the graveyard of disappointed hopes.’ Long after he won the 1921 Nobel physics prize, he never stopped producing them and on the day before  he died in 1955, was still on his famous thirty-year quest for a unified theory capable of combining electromagnetism and gravity. 

Another example: Michelangelo. He could have luxuriated in retirement after his David and Pietà won him his place in sculpture’s firmament. He continued to hammer out new marvels instead, decade after decade, and spent seventeen of the last twenty years before his exit in 1564, aged eighty-nine, going full-tilt at his supreme accomplishment — the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. He did that keenly aware that he would never see it in limestone, in its finished state. 

It would of course be better if Musk succeeds in his lifetime, but the worst case always bears thinking about.

4. Improvisational — like quicksilver, various, and adaptive — is a quality Elon Musk shares with cerebral-danceable progressive rock (prog) bands such as King Crimson in its earliest (mid-‘70s) incarnation 

It is a characteristic indispensable to successful new media management. 

To observers, Musk’s work and private lives look overwhelmingly chaotic. He already has his (tunnel-)Boring, Neuralink, SpaceX and Tesla companies competing for his attention, with regulators and packs of lawyers — in addition to his nine children and their three mothers; and past and present girlfriends. But this existence that few of us could tolerate for a week is a lot like prog, whose fractured and broken, jazz-like surfaces sound annoying in early encounters, until that breakthrough day when the listener perceives the serene, lush underlying harmonies borrowed by its most gifted musicians from modern classical music. 

‘All barricades are down with King Crimson but mayhem does not result,’ a New York Times reviewer remarked in 1973, after noting that the group ‘gallops into the neoclassical, pulls sharply back into rock, indulges in some just plain pretty music […] changes tempo and mood and comes up with some quirky surrealism in the lyrics.’ 

No matter what turbulence is roiling his families and companies, Musk himself seems to pile up impossible achievements steadily, relentlessly and, it must be said, bafflingly. It’s as though his mind has mysterious underlying harmonies in its depths.

Perhaps this natural sympathy between him and Crimson could encourage him to learn from a legend in prog history about the virtues of staying buttoned-up, at the right time — curbing his tendency to speak and act on impulse, for which his critics lambaste him mercilessly. A tender, exquisitely poignant improvisation for a quartet — ‘Trio’ on Starless and Bible Black — was recorded with only three actual players. 

Every time the drummer, Bill Bruford, wondered whether it was time for him to join in, he sensed that he would be messing with perfection. For never once uncrossing his drumsticks from over his chest for the entire session, his band-mates rewarded him with a co-writing credit for ‘admirable restraint.’

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If the reports leaked in May about Musk’s plans for Twitter are reliable, they include halving the platform’s dependence on advertising for revenue, and introducing monthly user subscriptions to replace the lost cash.

Let us hope that he can do that as a first stage in the reinvention of media. 

How far will he go? 

A far-sighted text to him earlier this year from his friend Jack Dorsey — the Twitter co-founder who became estranged from his creation — said, in part:

Yes, a new platform is needed. It can’t be a company. That is why I left. … It can’t have an advertising model. Otherwise you will have surface area that governments and advertisers will try to influence and control.

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** Huge thanks to John Logan for spotting my confusion of billions and trillions, and misspelling of kung fu. 

Social media critics who do not separate their objections are cooking up an anti-Big Tech jambalaya confusing regulators about the ‘surveillance capitalism’ that Google did not pioneer

. Big Data collection, Big Tech, Social media, Business models for publishing, Culture after Gutenberg, Regulation of Big Tech, Social media and networking, Surveillance business model, Surveillance capitalism, The future of publishing . , , , , , , , , , , ,

 

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social media postgutenberg@gmail.com

We have to discriminate carefully between light and dark elements of social media platforms

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Here is an indirect reply to a tweet from @nikluac to @postgutenbergB, a few days ago  — which contained a link to a New York Times opinion piece by Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emerita of the Harvard Business School. Flashing red lights set off by a single paragraph in her essay led to post-Gutenberg.com [pG] ’s first investigation of Professor Zuboff’s hugely influential, best-selling book published a year ago, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 

That work, which offers ‘little by way of a concrete agenda’ for internet-centred reform according to Evgeny Morozov, and other reviewers, is on a very different mission from this pG site — which argues for a specific scheme. The professor has succeeded uniquely and brilliantly at her task of so-called ‘consciousness-raising’. In seven hundred pages, her book explains and condemns the extent and precise mechanisms of what she and other analysts have named surveillance capitalism. 

It is the same phenomenon to which pG has been drawing attention since August of 2013  — with no claims of pioneering insight — in the course of campaigning for a proposal for the democratisation of publishing. This involved — in part — pointing out that like the Big Tech social media platforms, powerful newspapers were also spying on their readers without notification or consent. In posts here, digital invasions of privacy have been referred to variously as commercial surveillance or the surveillance business model — or, for anorexic attention spans incapable of absorbing more than a long header, as the ‘“free” surveillance/advertising-centred/data-cow business model’, or ‘the ‘pay-to-be-spied-on contract for e-commerce.’

Why did the following paragraph in Professor Zuboff’s NYT essay in late January — in the context of its headline and theme — set alarm bells jangling?

You Are Now Remotely Controlled

Surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth.

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Only repeated crises have taught us that these platforms are not bulletin boards but hyper-velocity global bloodstreams into which anyone may introduce a dangerous virus without a vaccine. This is how Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, could legally refuse to remove a faked video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and later double down on this decision, announcing that political advertising would not be subject to fact-checking. 

That is an intensely emotive jambalaya, and not a logical argument. It is a fact that the platforms do indeed serve as ‘bulletin boards’ for useful, unobjectionable and frequently important messages from millions of users, every day. The article unreasonably conflates the ‘hate speech’ debate — about the platforms as carriers of social viruses — with the discussion of what needs to be done about regulating commercial surveillance and the theft of our personal data. Professor Zuboff somehow blurs the refusal of social media platforms such as Facebook to control what some individual users post there with not one but two unrelated questions — first, about whether paid political advertising on those sites should be curbed or forbidden; secondly, about what limits should be placed on information-gathering about platform users.

In her book she mashes all those together on the grounds that refusing to censor their users means that the social media platforms attract more users; can keep them on their sites for longer to gather more information about them; and, by growing their audiences in this way, earn more advertising dollars. 

While that is all undoubtedly true, it does not add up to an argument for treating the platforms like the owners of newspapers that are responsible for the work of their employees. Besides, there is something far more critical at stake, here.

Professor Zuboff mostly ignores or pays only cursory attention to the indispensable role that the platforms have assumed for most of us as cyberspace equivalents of town halls, libraries, coffee houses, debating clubs, pubs and soapboxes, and of pamphleteering and other printed means of disseminating facts and opinions — among other institutions and media. 

In an interview with the editor in chief in the latest issue of Wired, the United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, endorses the idea of access to the internet as a basic human right. He explains:

People are saying all the voices must be heard. The idea of a very small group of people can decide for everything is now being put into question very seriously. … [I]n each country, the trigger is different. In some cases it’s an economic-driven occasion, in others it’s pressure on the political system, in others corruption, and people react. But I see more and more people wanting to assume responsibility, wanting their voices to be heard. And that is the best guarantee we have that political systems will not be corrupted.

Here, pG — which has so far been among Facebook’s most relentless critics, most recently, for its new practice of selectively handing out gigantic pots of cash to famous newspapers and magazines — must concede that Mark Zuckerberg is right to say that ‘People of varied political beliefs are trying to define expansive speech as dangerous because it could bring results they don’t accept,’ and that he believes that ‘this is more dangerous to democracy in the long term than almost any speech.’ His idea of trying out ‘a court-style board to rule on site content’ — staffed not by Facebook managers but independent outsiders — is also a good one, as long as the arbiters are genuinely independent, and expensive professional lawyers from the rickety U.S. legal system do not get involved in the sorting out of complaints.

Also in this month’s issue of Wired, Gideon Lewis-Kraus argues in an excellent meditation on the Big Tech controversy that … 

The opportunity to vent on social media, and occasionally to join an outraged online mob, might relieve us of our latent desire to hurt people in real life. It’s easy to dismiss a lot of very online rhetoric that equates social media disagreement with violence, but […] the conflation might reflect an accurate perception of the symbolic stakes: On this view, our tendency to experience online hostility as “real” violence is an evolutionary step to be cheered.

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To worry about whether a particular statement is true or not, as public fact-checkers and media-literacy projects do, is to miss the point. It makes about as much sense as asking whether somebody’s tattoo is true.

By all means let’s urgently make rules or draft laws for curtailing user surveillance and data-gathering by Big Tech. Devious impersonations such as sophisticated, digitally-manipulated misrepresentations of people — such as the fake Nancy Pelosi video mentioned by Professor Zuboff — should be prosecuted like any other form of identity theft. If anything is making people angry enough to ensure all that, it is The Age of Surveillance — succeeding where earlier books drawing attention to the same or similar problems have had no remotely comparable impact.

Among them is one published in 1997 by the Harvard Business School Press — Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never-Satisfied Customer.** In it, the Silicon Valley marketing innovator and investor Regis McKenna shows Professor Zuboff to be mistaken in one of her central assertions, which is that surveillance capitalism was ‘pioneered and elaborated through trial and error’ by Google in 2001.

While search engine technology allowed for a massive refinement of commercial surveillance and made it incommensurably insidious when misused, at least one other company actually hacked out the path to it. Real Time drew attention to ‘an excellent illustration of the shades of interactivity to come.’  This was in a six-month interlude in 1996, in which PepsiCo offered teenage and Generation X consumers of Mountain Dew fizzy drinks radically discounted electronic beepers to use with no communication charges. 

They were also given access to a toll-free telephone hookup over which they could listen to interviews with sports heroes — and the chance to get discounts from twenty other companies keen to sell this demographic group things ranging from tortilla chips to snowboards. PepsiCo paged the 50,000 participants in its scheme once a week to ask them questions in a ‘real-time dialogue with them,’ and anticipated eventually creating ‘an enormous, nonstop, electronic focus group at a remarkably low cost.’ Unfortunately, as Real Time noted, this soon led to ‘a firestorm of unanticipated criticism’ of the soft drink producer,’ for exploitation:

The company had assumed that this, of all communications technologies, would be irresistible to parents — helping two-career couples worried about their children’s whereabouts to keep in touch with them. Instead, the promotion was denounced as disturbingly manipulative by parents and children’s advocates — like the Center for Media Advocacy in Washington, D.C., a watchdog group, and Action for Children’s Television.

The New York Times report on the project said that ‘soliciting information from youths through the Internet and pagers also raises privacy questions.’

A quarter-century later we know that the anxiety was prescient — but now we also have free speech protection to worry about, separately.

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( A later post on the same topic is here ) 

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** Real Time was a short-order project, a book researched, written and edited on a brutal schedule, in less than six months, in 1996 — with the assistance of pG’s writer, who thanks @nikluac for the tweet that led to this excursion into the past.

Mystery solved? Famous newspapers that ignored the Social Media Strike of 2019 have agreed to accept regular payments of millions of dollars from Facebook

. 4th Estate moves, Big Tech, Social media, Business models for publishing, Culture after Gutenberg, Keiretsu-cooperative, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, Regulation of Big Tech, Social media and networking . , , , , , , , ,

 

peony, darkening of the light -- postgutenberg@gmail.com

The picture is darkening for those like the world wide web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who ‘remain committed to making sure the web is a free, open, creative space — for everyone.’

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[ Significant sections of this post-Gutenberg.com entry were edited for clarity on 2 November 2019 ]

The question of why so many famous newspapers railing against Big Tech failed to alert their readers to the Social Media Strike of 2019 — or report on it — has been answered partially, since the last post on this site.  That answer could hardly be more depressing for anyone to whom free speech and objective, independent, media matter.  Worse, it brings us closer to a real life equivalent of a dictator or other centralised authoritarian power running amok — that is, to the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

On Friday 25 October, Facebook announced that it will be paying millions of dollars to selected U.S. newspapers — the likes of The New York Times and Washington Post among them — for posting their stories (content) on its site.

According to an early August report in The Guardian that came up in search results for the query, ‘Facebook paying newspapers’ — following the accidental discovery of this news on the Wired site  — the company started hawking its offer of million-dollar-plus subsidies experimentally, in April. Could publishing organisations trying to decide whether they should accept one have failed to cover the Social Media Strike set for  4-5 July for that reason?

It certainly looks like a strong possibility, even if different considerations were at work for each publication. The Guardian, for instance, might not have been approached by Facebook, even though it has a U.S. website. The explanation for its dissing of the strike could have been that the call to action was led by Larry Sanger, one of the Wikipedia’s two long-estranged co-founders. The other, Jimmy Wales, has been a member of the newspaper’s parent company, Guardian Media Group, since at least 2018.

Wired has already demonstrated that taking Facebook’s cash does not necessarily — or immediately — deprive a publication of the ability to balance its reporting about that platform. Its article on the subject quoted an activist working on behalf of traditional newspapers who described the Facebook move as ‘a “conveniently timed announcement that’s clearly meant to distract from Zuckerberg getting eviscerated on the Hill this week”’ — a reference to the founder-CEO’s grilling by members of the U.S. House of Representatives financial services committee in Washington DC.

Yet, because the magazine did not spurn Facebook, Wired’s overall characterisation of the corporation’s new sugar daddy role in the lives of newspapers must be interpreted as favourable — in keeping with one quotation in its report, about the cash infusions ‘having the potential to shift parts of the news industry from “pessimism to optimism”’. [ pG’s emphasis ]

Facebook is only giving some newspapers money, in a scheme it is still unfurling, effectively playing king-maker. Is it naïve to expect that in the future, the newspapers that have until now been exposing the social media colossus’s worst business practices — and demanding that it be made accountable to the public for those actions — will start competing to win favour from it? 

How can these papers possibly cover it objectively when they are vying for larger cash handouts from it? It is hard not to imagine past leaders of newspapers proud of a tradition of reporting ‘without fear or favour’ turning in their graves.

In the U.K. and U.S., newspaper campaigns against Facebook’s data-stealing and privacy violations, among other offences, have been vital prods for MPs and legislators now investigating the need for closer government oversight, if not regulation, of Big Tech. 

If traditional media’s interests become less and less distinguishable from the social media giant’s and they can no longer act as a check on its actions and powers, what happens next? Who in the traditional Establishment could we count on to oppose a deadly merging of government and commerce — by, say, a government trying to invoke emergency powers to requisition Big Tech’s vast and ever-expanding stores of data about us? Invoke those powers illegitimately? And how could that fail to turn some of George Orwell’s nightmare visions into everyday reality? 

The progressive centralisation of media financing and power, and of data collection about ordinary citizens, raises the risk of an authoritarian central force seizing control. It could make that a cakewalk. (The newly created Big Brother would not necessarily be domestic: it could easily be a hostile foreign government.)

Newspapers that have consented to taking Facebook’s coin should reverse their decision immediately — but are unlikely to do anything of the kind. By far the most thoughtful and intelligent reaction to the novel scheme came from a writer or writers on the Techdirt website in Redwood City, in the northern half of Silicon Valley. Crisply written, and with a critical historical perspective missing from every other commentary on that subject, Techdirt‘s take on the topic is essential reading. Its conclusion is in perfect harmony with pG’s (see ‘Wanted: a brave newspaper, for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders ( updated )’:

If we want to “fix” journalism, it will require a new path forward (i.e., innovative business models).

Accepting Facebook’s Trojan horse handouts would not be the right sort of innovation or improvement on the defective business model most widely used today. Here is (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, lamenting the effects of that model on his brainchild’s evolution, after its open and liberating early years:

The web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today. What was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms. This concentration of power creates a new set of gatekeepers, allowing a handful of platforms to control which ideas and opinions are seen and shared.

These dominant platforms are able to lock in their position by creating barriers for competitors.

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Two myths currently limit our collective imagination: the myth that advertising is the only possible business model for online companies, and the myth that it’s too late to change the way platforms operate. On both points, we need to be a little more creative.

A year ago, Facebook acquired a key to opening doors to high government offices everywhere when it hired Nick (Sir Nicholas) Clegg — Britain’s deputy prime minister from 2010-15 —  to serve as its head of global policy and communications. As the company’s capacious pockets are used to favour some venerable, still dominant old media powers not just with gifts of cash but — presumably — special treatment on its platform, old and new media seem well on their way to creating an even more unassailable Establishment.  This could make a U-turn towards decentralising power ever more difficult and probably, impossible. 

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