Category Archives: Culture after Gutenberg

Notes from the post-print transition, 1: the advertising moonshot of Google’s Larry Page and Private Eye’s meerkat phobia

. Culture after Gutenberg, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate . , , , , , ,

Meerkat to the Eye: ‘You surely don't mean, me?’ - postgutenberg [at] gmail.com

Meerkat to the Eye: ‘You surely don’t mean, me?’
– postgutenberg [at] gmail.com

Anyone sensible who, for decades, has bought nothing expensive without consulting Britain’s Which? (owned by the Consumers’ Association) or Consumer Reports in the U.S. (owned by Consumers Union) can understand Larry Page’s apparent belief, over a decade ago, that conventional advertising would soon be obsolete.

Advertising equals lifeblood in the traditional economic model for newspapers and magazines – the scheme that will soon look pre-historic. In a splendid Business Insider profile, in a section about the early years of the company Page co-founded with Sergey Brin, a far-out idea – known as a moonshot, at the search engine colossus — is described:

… [A]fter Google had become the Internet’s most successful advertising business, Page decided the company should destroy the advertising agency industry. To his thinking, it was obviously a highly inefficient system that could be erased with the help of technology. Not only did the company opt not to take on this battle, but [other top Google executives] did their best to make sure none of Google’s many important ad-agency clients caught wind of Page’s ideas on the topic.

His seems like a straightforward, logical conclusion to anyone who believes – as we do at post-Gutenberg – that

… the perfect search engine would understand whatever your need is. It would understand everything in the world deeply [and] give you back kind of exactly what you need.

That is also a quotation of Page, in the same article.

Private Eye — writing more frankly than any other print publication about the hopelessness of trying to carry the advertising-dependent print model for economic survival into the digital future – has had riveting news in recent ‘Ad Nauseam’ columns, information we have seen nowhere else. … Essential reading, even if the last snippet seems proof of a bizarre phobia at the indispensable satirical magazine – or, possibly, a regrettable instance of inter-species prejudice:

– from Private Eye, No. 1367, 30 May – 12 June, 2014:

The latest digital advertising medium to have its efficacy questioned is video ads.

Recent research suggests that nearly 60 percent of them are never seen by a human being, which does rather post the question as to what media buyers are actually paid for.

– from Private Eye, No. 1369, 27 June -10 July 2014:

Facebook recently admitted what everyone in advertising had already twigged – that no one is reading anything brands put on Facebook any more.

The company posted a long explanation for this, protesting loudly against the idea that it could possibly have anything to do with selling more ads, suggesting instead that it was a problem of there simply being too much ‘branded content’ on the platform. This is all well and good, except a) that problem is entirely of Facebook’s making, given that it has spent seven years telling all brands they have to be on there (without adequately explaining why); and b) all its solutions for brands to get over this issue involve, er, buying more adverts.

– from Private Eye, No. 1367, 30 May – 12 June, 2014:

The latest terrifying vision of the future comes via Personal Neuro, a company which is working with Google Glass to produce wearable technology, which can monitor a wearer’s brainwaves, gauge their mood or state of mind – and feed adverts directly into their eyeballs based on that data!

Welcome to a future in which you will never be able to escape that bloody meerkat, however hard you try

If Personal Neuro is real, not just a vision that came swimming into editorial brains at the Eye after a lavish liquid lunch, why does a Google search turn up no information about this Canadian startup in any other well-known print organ?

What should a writer’s position be on the battle between Amazon and the Hachette publishing conglomerate? Let’s have some basic information, for a start

. Culture after Gutenberg, E-books, The future of publishing, writers and money . , , ,
alley

– photograph by MIL22

As print publishing firms competing with digital rivals have less than ever to give the majority of writers – who have no record as best-sellers — where should scribblers’ sympathies lie in the fight between the Hachette publishing empire and Amazon?

The essential details of what they are quarrelling about are being hidden from us on grounds of commercial secrecy — as noted in one report after another**. These are negotiations conducted down dark alleys. Without those details, we can only puzzle over the tones of ringing certainty in which newspaper commentators have unanimously been denouncing Amazon – although the bookselling giant was plainly wrong to punish Hachette and its authors in these ways noted by The Los Angeles Times:

Amazon is subjecting many books from Hachette to artificial purchase delays. Books that had been available for next-day delivery now take 2-5 weeks to ship. Some titles don’t surface in search as they should. … As a result, Hachette will sell fewer books.

Strangely absent from coverage of the war is an eye-popping point for writers made by a sharp-eyed reader of The New York Times:

To the Editor:

Neither Amazon nor the publishers are pure of heart. Amazon is facing serious pressure on the profitability front from investors, so it is looking to increase margins and reduce costs.

The publishers see e-books as their largest profit area. A Publisher’s Lunch article last year showed the profit breakdown for HarperCollins:A $27.99 hardcover provides a $5.67 profit to the publisher and a $4.20 royalty to the author; a $14.99 e-book provides a $7.87 profit to the publisher and a $2.62 royalty to the author.

While the publishers are making a claim to a noble struggle against Amazon’s efforts to devalue publishing, they are also seeking to protect their higher profits on e-books, not higher royalties for writers. While Amazon claims to want to offer readers the best pricing, Amazon has no qualms about using its powerful market leverage to get what it seeks while inflicting collateral pain on readers to boost its profits.

The two players that are suffering in this situation are the authors (book sales delayed or prevented, dramatically lower royalties) and the consumers, many of whom have invested heavily in the Kindle-based environment.

CHRIS WATSON

Barrington, R.I., May 31, 2014

For authors to extract a bigger share of e-royalties, we are guessing that more scribblers with market power ranging from middling to great will have to start publishing e-books on their own, and do well at it. What advantages of being conventionally published do they give up, when they take the indie road? Fewer and fewer. Many more authors who have tried both the old route to being published and the new say exactly what this Guardian reader did last month, reacting in the comments section of a blog post about self-publishing:

remittancegirl

29 May 2014

I’m not a fan of self-publishing, but I don’t think this article addresses some of the salient reasons for its rise. Nothing is mentioned of the radical shift in traditional publishing to put marketing efforts into nothing but established writers with blockbuster track records, or its abandonment of a good editorial process.

Having been one of those writers who did get published by a major publisher, it quickly became obvious that it was a waste of time and financially costly. The royalty rates offered (especially on electronic sales) are, frankly, laughable. There is no effort at marketing. As a new author, you are expected to do all the publicity and marketing for yourself anyway. The least one might expect was a decent line edit, but the book I published through a major house was published with typographical errors aplenty. So, exactly how does it benefit new writers to even consider submitting to a traditional publisher?

Forget the money. What about the cultural landscape? Are publishers are lining up to publish radically new forms of narrative? No. In fact, the chances of you getting a publishing deal for your book depends, most notably, on how much it resembles another book that’s done well.

And if a writer opts for self-publishing and does well with it, there is a far better chance of having a major publisher will pick you up, republish your work, offer far better terms, better editors and some marketing – now that you no longer need it.

… [T]he disdain in this article for the self-published work doesn’t take into account what is driving many authors to circumvent the publishing apparatus altogether.

The Independent noted,

At least one author, Barry Eisler, is standing up for Amazon, saying: “More people are buying more books than ever and more people are making a living by writing them. Why do millionaire authors want to destroy the one company that’s made this all possible?”

The problem for many in publishing is that the dominance of this one company, with its Kindle store, keeps growing. It is estimated that e-book sales will soar to almost $9bn this year in America, while print book sales fall below $20bn, down from $26bn in 2010.

Yes, it’s clear from those numbers that Amazon has too much power in e-publishing. But to see what can be done about it, let’s have some more information about precisely what terms it was arguing about with Hachette.

Transparency, please.

…

** For instance, although The Los Angeles Times’s handy summary of the dispute is highlighted as an instance of ‘an unusually public battle’ — in ‘Amazon and Hachette: The dispute in 13 easy steps,’ — its step 6 says:

Amazon has not commented to The Times regarding this dispute other than to point us to a message-board posting in the Kindle discussion forums on its site. There, it explained that Hachette was one of its 70,000 suppliers and that the two had been unable to reach acceptable terms (without disclosing what was being negotiated).

21st-century cooperatives, again: can tools like Loomio’s de-fang hostile, squabbling members – becoming digital go-betweens for conflict resolution?

. Cooperatives, Culture after Gutenberg . , , , , , ,
Cooperating and conferring can be effortless and delightful … or … - photograph by MIL22

Cooperating and conferring can be effortless and delightful … or …
– photograph by MIL22

… cooperating can try cooperators’ patience and goodwill - photograph: Biocentre-building, Kenya: Nordic FolkeCenter for Renewable Energy

… cooperating can try cooperators’ patience and goodwill
– photograph: Biocentre-building, Kenya: Nordic FolkeCenter for Renewable Energy

Loomio — fashioning software aids to joint decision-making that any group, anywhere, can use for free – was born from the collective activism we know as the Occupy movement. Its founders know that defusing the conflicts inevitable in almost any cooperative is the trickiest part of running one. An excellent encapsulation of its history by Hamish McKenzie in Pando Daily says:

Like their peers at Occupy Wall Street, and at other Occupy camps around the world, the Wellington demonstrators would make group decisions through an inclusive process in which anyone who wanted a say got one. The group would then vote on which proposals to adopt.

…[T]he model … would come to form the basis of Loomio, a Web app that facilitates collaborative decision-making – but the process had a dark side. For a start, the people with the loudest voices and the most confident speakers eventually came to dominate the discussion; even simple decisions could become long, drawn out, highly argumentative ordeals. Meanwhile, as the camp ran its course and people started to leave, the only people left were the hardcore occupiers and the homeless people who had come in search of social support and meals. It got to a point where the group discussion was lopsided in favor of male, white voices, and not particularly inclusive after all. Occupy eventually ended its presence in the square, and people moved on.

However [the software’s designers] didn’t want to give up on the idea of spreading Occupy’s brand of participatory democracy to wider society …

The job of wresting peace and concord from the jaws of animosity and resentment has never been one for the impatient or faint of heart – as long as there have been human beings. If post-Gutenberg is optimistic about organisations run on the net being more successful at managing conflict than the cooperatives of the 1970s it is because …

  • the discussions and arguments are transparent – viewable by everyone
  • there are records of who said what that make lying, manipulation, scheming and every form of slipperiness and bullying more difficult

The larger the audience for scrapping antagonists, the more people there are to punish bullies (as in imposing penalties on or sanctions against them), and the harder it is to resist peace-brokering efforts without looking deranged, stupid, or evil.

At least this is what we have long suspected at post-Gutenberg. When we set off in search of other people’s ideas about defusing hostility, we came upon the conclusion in a 2000 paper on the subject – ‘Conflict prevention and conflict resolution: limits of multilateralism’ — by Fred Tanner, a top-ranking Red Cross (ICRC) expert in Geneva, that ‘conflict prevention remains an enigma’.

Of course his subject was the prevention of war and butchery between countries and tribes. And of course digital transparency and communication, now part of the fabric of daily life and negotiation, were far less developed fourteen years ago.

That there might be reason to hope for change through digital go-betweens – software tools used by groups to manage conflict – was confirmed in a surprising article by Albert Sun in The New York Times about applying mathematical modelling to a specific problem. We leave you to this excerpt from it, and strongly recommend following the link to the rest of the piece:

Every month, unrelated people move into apartments together to save on rent. Many decide to simply divide the rent evenly, or to base it on bedrooms’ square footage or perhaps even on each resident’s income.

But as it turns out, a field of academics is dedicated to studying the subject of fair division, or how to divide good and bad things fairly among groups of people. To the researchers, none of the typical methods are satisfactory. They have better ways.

The problem is that individuals evaluate a room differently. I care a lot about natural light, but not everyone does. Is it worth not having a closet? Or one might care more about the shape of the room, or its proximity to the bathroom.

A division of rent based on square feet or any fixed list of elements can’t take every individual preference into account. And negotiation without a method may lead to conflict and resentment.

… I came across a paper by Francis Su, a math professor at Harvey Mudd College in California, about a mathematical proposition discovered in 1928 by the German mathematician Emanuel Sperner. It is called Sperner’s lemma.

The connection between Sperner’s lemma and rent division was first published by Dr. Su in a 1999 paper titled “Rental Harmony: Sperner’s Lemma in Fair Division.”

[…]

Dr. Su realized that it might be related to another problem he had heard about, in which a group has to divide a theoretical cake when some want frosted flowers or an edge with more frosting.

“The trick is to design a procedure to have everyone act in their own self-interest and have an outcome that’s fair,” he said in an interview.

[…]

To promote the use of the new methods being invented, Ariel D. Procaccia, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has been working on a website, Spliddit, to help people use these methods to fairly divide things like the order of names of co-authors on a scientific paper or prized possessions in a divorce.

“There are all these examples of really nice ways to solve the problem,” he said, “but nobody’s using them.”

[ continues … ]

 

Loomio: open-source tools from young New Zealand techies to make the dream of practical, efficient, sexy cooperatives come true

. Cooperatives, Culture after Gutenberg . , , , , , , , ,
Bricks for building a working model for cooperatives are being conjured out of the ether – in prototypes by young New Zealand techies - photograph by MIL 22

Bricks for building a working model for cooperatives are being conjured out of the ether – in prototypes by young New Zealand techies
– photograph via MIL 22

Can a group of young New Zealand revolutionaries save the world – by rescuing cooperatives from the taint of failed hippie idealism and accusations of underestimating the selfishness of human beings?

We discovered Loomio, founded in Wellington this year, in thinking about Thomas Piketty’s mountainously substantiated belief, in his world champion bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that unchecked capitalism has signed its own death warrant — by ignoring the tidal wave of anger and outrage about increasingly dire and shocking social inequality.

This blog, post-Gutenberg, is founded on the conviction justified in a paper for the Oxford Internet Institute in 2010 that organisations owned by their contributors are the key to levelling the playing field in the media – that this is essential, if we want the form of government by the people we call ‘democracy’ to work properly. So of course we’re wondering when Piketty will come to the same conclusion – like Pope Francis, as we reported last year in ‘Could a pope getting respect on atheist blogs make co-operatives his weapon for fighting poverty?’.

Googling ‘Piketty’ and ‘cooperatives’ did not only produce Shaila Dewan, also making this connection, in ‘Who Needs a Boss?’ in The New York Times. It led to an excellent discussion on the Hacker News site last month.

We were close to ecstatic to learn on that forum about the birth of Loomio – a group of young software designers with exactly the right skills to support the point made on this blog in February of 2012, that the lightning digital communication we have now means that cooperatives no longer have to be bogged down by endless meetings and chronic bickering and power-mongering. We said, then, in ‘A better Facebook — or why cooperatives run on the web should work better than the old hippie kind’:

Lots of us had our first encounters with cooperatives in the 1970s — as places owned and run by early evangelists for whole-grain and organic foods […] Many such organisations disintegrated because of warring and secretive factions that did not always share what they knew; slow communication between members; the logistical difficulties that meeting in person often entailed, and confusion about aims and aspirations.

For cooperatives using these digital thingies we all have now, many of those problems would never arise. The new tools make it easy for everyone to see the same information, and to spell out goals and policies crisply. […] To run an organisation designed as a cooperative, everyone involved could study complex new information together online, and decide questions at the blinding speed that, … for instance, … The Guardian’s opinion polls work …

Someone especially brilliant behind the founding of Loomio grasped the idea all the way down to the mention in that second paragraph of The Guardian’s opinion polls – whose progress happens to be displayed in pie charts. The Wikipedia summary of Loomio’s mission explains: ‘Loomio is a libre software application for group decision-making and collaboration […] As discussions progress the group receives feedback on a proposal through an up-datable pie chart.’

We urge our readers to visit the Loomio.org site for further – erm – enlightenment (could this be a group who grew up reading about Harry Potter’s ‘Lumos!’ spell?). Its home page announces: ‘Loomio unleashes the internet’s potential to bring people towards consensus rather than polarized debate..’

In the meanwhile, here is a practical idealist at a startup in New York explaining how using Loomio’s toolkit fits the charter and modus operandi of his own organisation – the Colab Cooperative — ‘a worker-owned tech cooperative supporting startup social enterprises through agile development of … products that we hope will change the world for the better’. The upper-case letters are our own annotations — reactions and mental notes — reading his contribution to the Hacker News discussion:

PROGRESS! SOMEONE ARGUING FROM HANDS-ON EXPERIMENTATION …We have found the biggest plus of being a cooperative to be the sense of equality amongst our crew stemming from a democratic-based decision making process and a path to membership (as a co-owner) available to all (assuming performance and cultural standards are met).

THE BRIGHTEST SOCIALLY-AWARE TECHIES WILL IN FUTURE CHOOSE COOPS …Moving forward we are of the opinion that the many of the best and brightest in our industry who seek social and environmental change will choose to work in cooperatives rather than traditional corporations even if it means sacrificing some personal financial benefit to do so (although hopefully this will not be needed as more resources go to supporting cooperatives).

IDEALISM IS NOT THE DRUG OF FOOLS BUT THE WAY SOME THINGS IMPROVE IN THE WORLD, BIT BY BIT …The ‘meaning quotient’ of life generally trumps all for those we work with and those who support cooperatives.

RECOGNISES NEED FOR ‘EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE’ AND STRONGLY SHARED BELIEFS … In terms of keynotes, running a cooperative successfully requires: – emotional intelligence – operational processes that support intra-team communication and collaborative work – a willingness to put your trust in your co-workers – a strong sense of cultural identity – a mission that can be shared with members and partners.

LEARNING TO BALANCE LEADERSHIP FOR SPEED, WHEN THIS IS MISSION-CRITICAL, WITH CONSULTATION-AND-COLLABORATION, THE ORGANISATION’S CORE CULTURE … Given this is HN, I will say that there is some tension b/t the ‘lead by your gut’ – fast and furious – approach of most entrepreneurs and the emphasis in cooperatives on getting consensus from the team on big decisions. As a former ‘traditional’ entrepreneur with some VC / startup experience, I feel like we have found a nice balance b/t empowering our management team to lead with their ‘gut’ business instincts while also engaging in proactive communication with the team around key business decisions.

ADMITS MISTAKES …That said I have also at times stepped on some toes and gently bruised some egos with my former ways. So it is a learning process for sure…

EXPERIMENTING WITH COLLABORATIVE DECISION MAKING SOFTWARE … As part of our communications work, we have begun experimenting with using http://loomio.org as part of our discussion and decision-making process.

Best of luck, Loomio and Colab. It will be a dream come true to see you prove sour, embittered old pessimists — like this Thomas Howard Kunstler commenting on Piketty — utterly mistaken:

[T]he second leading delusion in our culture these days, after the wish for a something-for-nothing magic energy rescue remedy, is the idea that we can politically organize our way out of the epochal predicament of civilization that we face. Piketty just feeds that secondary delusion.