Category Archives: Business models for publishing

Proofs of concept for a keiretsu-cooperative to succeed the data collection and ad-dependent legacy publishing model— from TikTok, the online Daily Mail … and Shakespeare

. 4th Estate moves, Big Data collection, Business models for publishing, Commercial surveillance, Cooperatives, Keiretsu-cooperative, Surveillance business model, The 5th Estate in action, The future of publishing, writers and money . , , , , , , , , , ,
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

…

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

…

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. 

This improbable group answers the question of what evidence there is for the practicality of a keiretsu-cooperative to succeed the noxious advertising and personal data collection-dependent  surveillance business model for journalism and publishing. 

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-G jottings 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.

…

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 proof that newspapers’ reader-commenters are data-collection gold is in site-owners’ tightening restrictions; attempts to control the historical record; and seizing gifts to the commons for themselves

. Big Data collection, Business models for publishing, Coercive early AI, Keiretsu-cooperative, The seasons . , , , ,
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

…

…

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

…

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 Guardian report 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.

…

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.

There was of course no glimmer, in that past, of anything like the proposal related to this post-Gutenberg site’s launch in 2011 — a description of a new economic structure or ‘business model’ for publishing I called a keiretsu-cooperative, which placed reader-commenters at its core. I saw a chance for a sort of symphysis: commenters and publishers evolving, growing and prospering together — after an experimental phase in which the idea was debugged and refined.

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.

Signs such as these:

— Blocking or interfering with downloading and saving articles and comments — that is, readers’ ability to take delivery of what they have paid for.

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 order in 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) notice any saved comment contributed 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 commenters from 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.

…

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. 

…

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

…

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. 

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 . , , , , , , , , , , ,

…

…



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

…



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

…

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

…

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.

…

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.

…

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.’

…

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.

…

…

** 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 . , , , , , , , , , , ,

 

…

social media postgutenberg@gmail.com

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

…

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.

…

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.

[…] 

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.

…

( A later post on the same topic is here ) 

…

** 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.