Category Archives: The future of 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

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A live scroll of 3,700 readers’ comments on U.K. taxation and a comment invitation box on the 6 March home page of the online Daily Mail look like illustrations for William Dutton’s The Fifth Estate: The Power Shift of the Digital Age

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Real-life counterparts of conceptions of things to come can appear in unlikely places, including some in the past. 

But, you may say — surely not the online Daily Mail coupled to the Chinese user-videos-plus-shopping platform, TikTok? Yes, and yes. But also from, of all people, the supreme William Shakespeare — or what literary experts and historians searching for the indisputable facts about his life have unearthed in recent decades. 

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.

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What could have been the equivalent of reader-commenter power for Shakespearean audiences? 

The 20th-century historian John Hale has shown that unlike the ‘patron-fostered painters of Italy, the Low Countries and Germany,’ the Bard ‘was reliant on popular support, as were his fellow playwrights.’ Their works and the venues for their performances were part of a democratically inclined ‘theatrical machinery that both responded to and increased the number of spectators and dramatists.’ Another impression from reading The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance is  of how uncannily today’s social media frenzy resembles the explosion in early 17th-century mass entertainment in London:

During the boom period of new plays, 1600-10 … the places available each year in the commercial theatre, discounting Sundays and Lent, may have topped a staggering two million when the population of London was two hundred and fifty thousand. Never before in Europe had there been so heavy a vote of confidence in a single form of cultural activity.

In another prefiguring of the present, Civilization shows the joys of expanding free expression for playwrights soon proving to be too much for the authorities:

Altogether the appetite for theatrical dialogue and effects was so constant as to enable a playwright to indulge his own aspirations short of flagrantly inviting political and religious censorship; bawdiness was let slip with a shrug, a contributory reason for the Puritan criticism which led eventually, in 1642, to the order that the theatres should be closed altogether, an order honoured almost as much in the breach as in the observance.

Some of the Puritans especially disgusted by their inability to control this tide in public affairs presumably let a different one carry them away to found a new colony on the other side of the sea. But here we are now, being reminded that the most satisfying narrative arcs can turn out to be circles. 

The keiretsu-cooperative seems to rhyme naturally with what has gone before, not just with what will or should be.

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.

[…] 

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.

Who is trying to write the Social Media Strike of 2019 out of today’s most widely relied-on historical record? And why did so many of the most powerful traditional news sites ignore it?

. Big Tech, Social media, Ownership of Big Tech, Social media and networking, The future of publishing . , , , , ,

 

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Let a hundred flowers blossom - pink peony bud - postgutenberg@gmail[dot]com

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Let a hundred flowers blossom - dried up peony bud - postgutenberg@gmail[dot]com

’Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and sciences … ‘ — said Chairman Mao, in a speech in Beijing on 27 February 1957. Chinese society has since evolved in precisely the opposite direction — as most Chinese would concede, whether for or against the policy reversal. Centralised authoritarian power in the shape of government interrupted the blossoming of Chinese culture, here symbolised by a peony — a flower native to China. Are we in the West going to let increasingly centralised and concentrated Big Tech roll back the internet’s supremely democratic, unprecedented flowering of creativity and freedom of speech — conceivably, in an unholy collaboration, soon, of government and commerce?

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Wikipedia decision to delete '2019 Social Media Strike' on 22 July 2019 postgutenberg@gmail.com

The debate among Wikipedians about the article on the 2019 Social Media Strike ended with a decision to delete it on 22 July

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The point of this post on pG is to create a record of the unsettling deletion this summer of a crucial memorialisation of the 2019 Social Media Strike — almost on a par with authoritarian governments writing out of history not just evidence of atrocities linked to them, but world-famous leaders and activists and their causes. The  perpetrator of this erasure is bizarre — the Wikipedia, or the net’s most generous gift to the congenitally curious, after search engines. Others have surely noticed the wiping-out — even if  repeated search queries have failed to yield any signs of shared noticing and dismay.

Some time in early summer, Larry Sanger, a computer scientist and web entrepreneur, began to broadcast an invitation to join a first-ever mass protest, slated for 4-5 July, against the ever more alarming concentration of power and intrusions into our lives on the largest internet platforms — such as Facebook and Twitter — that governments have so far left mostly unregulated. These are the platforms and phenomenon now referred to as Big Tech.

This pG site echoed the Sanger appeal. Though no one connected to pG can write computer code or has any qualifications in computer science, that response put a website dedicated to exploring ideas for the future evolution of publishing on the same side as the technorati (technical + literati) or technocratic elite — and notably out of step with traditional, conventional media. 

To be clear, those most aware of and best equipped to understand the deadly risks for us all in Big Tech power acted to support the strike. A shocking number of those who control the biggest megaphones for getting out the word about it did not.

This is easily seen in the links that search engines supply for ‘social media strike 2019’.

Compare these lists of web sites that either did or did not advertise or commemorate the strike in any way — unless pG has missed something, through incompetence (that readers are invited to complain about by leaving a comment below):

NO MENTION OF 2019 SOCIAL MEDIA STRIKE:

In addition to to their regular features and editorials on, and (/or) diligent reporting about Big Tech’s dark side, these publications frequently run op-ed analyses of that subject by outside experts  — which makes their shunning of the strike all the more interesting.

The Atlantic theatlantic.com 

The Financial Times ft.com

The Guardian guardian.co.uk

The New Yorker thenewyorker.com 

The New York Review of Books nybooks.com 

The New York Times nytimes.com 

The Washington Post washingtonpost.com 

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JOINED OR DREW ATTENTION TO 2019 SOCIAL MEDIA STRIKE:

BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48825410

Newsweek https://www.newsweek.com/reddit-technology-social-media-strike-larry-sanger-facebook-twitter-1447549

New York Post https://nypost.com/2019/07/02/wikipedia-co-founder-calls-for-social-media-strike-over-privacy-issues/ 

Reddit’s r/technology subreddit — a section of the forum popular with the technorati, which has millions of members, and went dark for 24 hours to support the strike. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/c7g36c/social_media_strike_proposed_for_july_45_by/

Salon https://www.salon.com/2019/07/03/wikepedia-co-founder-plans-social-media-strike-will-it-work/ 

Slashdot https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/06/30/1727228/wikipedia-co-founder-calls-for-a-social-media-strike-july-4-5 

The Daily Mail https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7202111/Wikipedia-founder-calling-social-media-strike-demand-platforms-restore-user-privacy.html

The Evening Standard https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/social-media-strike-larry-snager-internet-dark-a4183046.html 

The Register https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/01/wikipedia_founder_calls_for_social_media_strike/ 

Wired https://www.wired.com/story/larry-sanger-declaration-of-digital-independence/ 

Most curious of all was the treatment of the strike by the Wikipedia. Even before the event, it was given its own page in the online encyclopedia, which read as follows — in clear if inept prose, like sentences supplied by Google Translate on a bad day — just after midnight in California on 4 July 2019:

2019 social media strike is an upcoming pre-planned proposed potential strike on 4th and 5th of July 2019 advocated by former Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger coinciding with the Independence Day of the United States (on 4 July 2019) against the social media tech giants over data control.  It is supposed to be a two day strike inviting the social media users to switch off their access to social media platforms mainly such as Facebook and Twitter. The motive of the strike is to demand for the social media platforms to be decentralized from the top level management to the social media users in order to have the firm control over the data and also to solve the problems related to data privacy. [ pG’s highlight ] He also requested the volunteers to join him during the course by boycotting the social media networks on 4th and 5th of July 2019 or at least on either one of these mentioned dates. Larry Sanger is critical of the social media administrators over the misuse of users data and questioned the failures of them in solving the problems related to data privacy.[

The former Wikipedian also created a blog on his official website #Social media strike and also created an own petiton with the named titled Declaration of Digital Independence as a key to inspire the social media users to join him during the strike. He requested the volunteers those who are wishing to take part in the strike should sign in the relevant petition including the e-mail addresses in order to verify that they are legally taking part in the social media strike. The petition has gathered more than 1500 signatures as of 3 July 2019, a day before the strike.

But today, on 30 September 2019, that text is nowhere to be found in the Wikipedia. All that remains is this notice: 

Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for 2019 social media strike in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.

Scrolling down to the bottom of this ghostly document reveals that the original entry for the strike was deleted on 22 July 2019, after an ‘Articles for Deletion’ debate by Wikipedians.

In their jargon, which is not wholly impenetrable, these were the winning arguments that justified the expungement:

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Fails notability requirements, at the very least per WP:PERSISTENCE. — Fyrael (talk) 15:21, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

  • Delete Can’t really find anything about how it panned out. Sanger himself says it failed because of Twitter filters; that should speak for itself, IMO. – John M Wolfson (talk • contribs) 06:33, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
  • Delete Per WP:NOTNEWS. No lasting notability. AmericanAir88(talk) 15:19, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
  • Delete Doesn’t look like it succeeded at all, I fail to see how important this will be in the future. – numbermaniac 03:18, 22 July 2019 (UTC)

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Failed ‘notability requirements’ — really? Despite the strike’s respectful and intelligent coverage by the BBC and the online version of The Daily Mail? The former happens to be ‘the world’s largest news website,’ and the latter ‘the most visited English language newspaper website in the world,’ according to careful citations in — who’d have thought it! — Wikipedia articles about them ( here and here ).

And if the strike did fail, so what? 

Some of the most transformative social movements in the story of homo sapiens have had a feeble, damp-squib start. For a topical example, think of little Greta Thunberg and her campaign for action on climate change. As Bloomberg pointed out last week, the 16 year-old native of Sweden has turned around an environmental movement in Austria that was ‘frozen out of parliament just two years ago.’ 

The path of activism is strewn with such surprises — and the absence of evidence of progress is most certainly not evidence of a lack of progress.

So what explains the social media strike’s dissing by media heavyweights — and the Wikipedia’s erasure of the movement’s sputtering start? 

Possibilities that need investigation:

•Mainstream media live in terror of falling foul of e.g.., Facebook and Google. Consider, for instance,The Financial Times  — one surprising newspaper on the list of the unsupportive — which has run no end of thundering indictments of Big Tech by its editorial writers. Yet for reasons that must surely be related to some form of financial compensation by the search engine giant (unless pG is hallucinating), FT.com offers readers the option of signing in via Google or its own digital gatekeeper — which presumably lets Google collect data about exactly what some readers do on the site, every time they use its sign-in box. Information beginning with exactly who they are; their political opinions; personality and psychological profile; allies and enemies.

• Internal Wikipedia politics. Larry Sanger — the strike leader — was a co-founder of the net encyclopedia but left the organisation after a well-known disagreement about its evolution and ‘business model’. Could lingering resentments be part of the explanation for the decision to wipe the strike out of the record?

Daring, risky innovation by a famously conservative — notoriously hidebound — public service institution leaves old print ‘legacy’ media trailing far in its wake

. Keiretsu-cooperative, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, The future of publishing . , , , , ,

 

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ANDERS NILSEN on the power of graphic storytelling, New York Times, 18 October 2015 - postgutenberg@gmail.com

This set of drawings by Anders Nilsen — scanned from crumpled newsprint found lining a box of crockery — was an answer with a touch of genius to The New York Times’s invitation to artists in 2015 to convey ‘the power of graphic storytelling in one comic panel.’ What might that talking horse symbolise today? Could it be conventional — legacy — media’s post-Gutenberg future, with which they seemingly cannot strike up any sort of conversation?

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Believing the impossible gets easier with practice — say, half an hour a day, the White Queen advises Alice in Through the Looking-Glass. Here’s a mental barbell for anyone else attempting that exercise: the U.S. Navy, a military institution as renowned for being rigidly hierarchical, compartmentalised and tradition-bound as its counterparts in practically every country, has been implementing — not merely experimenting with — radically progressive new operating methods driven by new technology. 

Some of us waiting impatiently for an equivalent leap in publishing — or even the smallest experimental prototype with a hint of forward-thinking — could almost weep with envy, reading a thrilling account of nautical innovations in the July issue of The Atlantic Monthly. These are grounded in thinking about a much broader and deeper managerial revolution, as the title conveys: ‘At Work, Expertise is Falling Out of Favor.’ 

Possibly the most startling effect of reading the piece is realising how rare it has become to learn about large-scale innovation strictly for the public good, untainted by the profit motive. It is now hard to remember the last time a technological transformation with implications for nearly everyone was not about making some obscenely lucky 15 year-old a billionaire in three years, and greedy for even greater wealth and power.

A sample of the revelations from that tale of a sea change: 

… Built in 2014 from 30 million cans’ worth of Alcoa aluminum, Littoral Combat Ship 10, the USS Gabrielle Giffords, rides high in the water on three separate hulls and is powered like a jet ski—that is, by water-breathing jets instead of propellers. … Unlike the older ships now gliding past—guided-missile cruisers, destroyers, amphibious transports—the littoral combat ship was built on the concept of “modularity.” There’s a voluminous hollow in the ship’s belly, and its insides can be swapped out in port, allowing it to set sail as a submarine hunter, minesweeper, or surface combatant, depending on the mission.

… The ship’s most futuristic aspect, though, is its crew. The LCS was the first class of Navy ship that, because of technological change and the high cost of personnel, turned away from specialists in favor of “hybrid sailors” who have the ability to acquire skills rapidly. It was designed to operate with a mere 40 souls on board—one-fifth the number aboard comparably sized “legacy” ships and a far cry from the 350 aboard a World War II destroyer. The small size of the crew means that each sailor must be like the ship itself: a jack of many trades and not, as 240 years of tradition have prescribed, a master of just one.

… On most Navy ships, only a boatswain’s mate—the oldest of the Navy’s 60-odd occupations—would handle the ropes, which can quickly remove a finger or foot. But none of the three sailors heaving on the Giffords’s ropes is a line-handling professional. One is an information-systems technician. The second is a gunner’s mate. And the third is a chef. “We wear a lot of hats here,” Culinary Specialist 2nd Class Damontrae Butler says. After the ropes are put away, he reports to the ship’s galley, picks up a basting brush, and starts readying a tray of garlic bread for the oven.

Two boatswain’s mates are on hand, but only to instruct and oversee—and they too wear lots of hats, between them: fire-team leader, search-and-rescue swimmer, crane operator, deck patroller, helicopter-salvage coordinator.

… The operative concept is “minimal manning.” On the bridge, five crew members do the jobs usually done by 12, thanks to high-tech display screens and the ship’s several thousand remote sensors. And belowdecks, once-distinct engineering roles—electrician’s mate, engine man, machinist, gas-turbine technician—fall to the same handful of sailors.

… Minimal manning—and with it, the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists—isn’t a particularly nautical concept. Indeed, it will sound familiar to anyone in an organization who’s been asked to “do more with less”—which, these days, seems to be just about everyone.

… The Navy, curiously, has pushed the idea forward with an abandon unseen anywhere on land …

This¯article by Jerry Useem does not pretend that giving the methods of old sea dogs a makeover has been error-free. One innovation that has already come a cropper:

… [T]he modular “plug and fight” configuration was not panning out as hoped. Converting a ship from sub-hunter to minesweeper or minesweeper to surface combatant, it turned out, was a logistical nightmare. Variants of all three “mission packages” had to be stocked at far-flung ports; an extra detachment of 20-plus sailors had to stand ready to embark with each. More to the point, in order to enable quick mastery by generalists, the technologies on each had to be user-friendly—which they were not. So in 2016 the concept of interchangeability was scuttled for a “one ship, one mission” approach, in which the extra 20-plus sailors became permanent crew members.

Mistakes on the road to genuine progress are unavoidable. Time for another invocation of T. S. Eliot. His gloomy opinion of lilac-breeding featured here last year was nonsense, to any botanist, but this observation by him has rarely been stated better:  ‘Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.’