archive/dissertation
Nick Srnicek,
Douglas Rushkoff,
Robert W. McChesney,
Christian Fuchs,
Tim O'Reilly,
Franklin Foer,
McKenzie Wark,
Mark Andrejevic,
Evgeny Morozov,
Wolfgang Streeck
possibly relevant for my dissertation
[...] Establishing these kinds of exchanges is a major undertaking, requiring significant coordination between rights-holders, content platforms, collection agencies, and governments. But it may be worth the effort: efficient markets and platforms for exchanging IP will be economically valuable in an intangible economy.
specifically referring to FB and Goog. not only is Jaron Lanier's idea obviously dumb on its own merits, but the way these guys describe it ("efficient markets" for "exchanging IP") is somehow worse
[...] audiences, commodified as ratings, do not exist objectively in media use, but rather emerge from a tension between ways of defining valuable audiences and the formal procedures for manufacturing them as standardized commodities [...] the commodity audience is not naturally occurring, like a tree; it is a construction, like a toothpick, shaped by business exigencies and an unequal political economy. Indeed, the very concept of the audience "was hatched largely out of the marketing departments of companies with a stake in selling products through the media (Mosco and Kaye 2000, 32). [...]
I like the phrase "business exigencies"
[...] The work of the audience for advertisers and media organizations is more concrete now than in Smythe's day (Napoli 2010), and the production of commodity audiences further precedes the free lunch in the sphere of digital publishing, as automated advertising exchanges and programmatic buying practices divert subsidies from journalism and function almost exclusively to satisfy advertiser demand for particular demographics [...]
potential citation
Dan Schiller (1999a) historicises the corporate seizure of computing networks that form the infrastructure for a global market sytem. "At stake in this unprecedented transition to neoliberal or market-driven telecommunications," Schiller argues, "are nothing less than the production base and control structure of an emerging digital capitalism" [...]
just nice language
[...] the workplace where people got paid was transformed ideologically. People learned there that work under monopoly capitalism involves competition between individuals whose possessive needs necessarily set them in conflict with each other rather than with the owners of the means of their (concealed) cooperative production. The carrot which systematically motivated them was the pursuit of commodities [...]
not really relevant to the rest of this essay, but a nice way of putting it
[...] instrumental problems that required solutions in order to facilitate transactions between advertisers and broadcasters. The most obvious was to demonstrate the existence of an audience. In economic terms, this meant some measure of productivity. But besides adequate numbers of listeners, a measure was needed to demonstrate that the right product was being produced that the audience for which advertisers expressed a demand was in fact being delivered by broadcasters. Only after agreeing on a basic method for producing measures of productivity and quality could broadcasters and advertisers move to the real business at hand--the buying and selling of audiences according to a rational price structure.
Inherent in the situation, then, is both continuity and discontinuity in the interests of the advertising and broadcasting industries. While continuity rests in the need for an official description of the audience, discontinuity arises from the connection between that description and pricing. [...] neither industry could trust the other to measure productivity and quality, yet both needed some measure in order to transact sales. In this way, despite unified demand for measures of productivity and quality, the situation presented contradictory interests and thereby the possibility for independence for any ratings producer that could successfully manipulate those differences. [...]
think about how this applies to digital advertising? where fb/goog have all the data (massive info asymmetry) and both publishers AND advertisers have to simply trust
remember that time, summer 2013, when doubleclick fucked up and accidentally paid publishers twice? like massive deposits (thousands, at least) doubled for publishers like the NYT. and it took a while to notice
also: nielson is partnering with these companies where they dont themselves have the ability to gatekeep the ratings process (like FB / Nielson partnering for TV shit), but obvs they would prefer to absorb that vertical on their own
Let's begin with the advertising-supported commercial media as part of the whole economy. How do they make a profit? A short answer would be that the media speed up the selling of commodities, their circulation from production to consumption. Hence, they speed the realization of value (the conversion of value into a money form) embodied in commodities produced everywhere in the economy. Through advertising, the rapid consumption of commodities cuts down on circulation and storage costs for industrial capital. Media capital (e.g., broadcasters) receives a portion of surplus value (profits) of industrial capital as a kind of rent paid for access to audiences. The differences between this rent and its costs of production (e.g., wages paid to media industry workers) constitute its profit.
[...] there is much wasted watching by irrelevant viewers. Specification and fractionation of the audience leads to a form of concentrated viewing by the audience in which there is (from the point of view of advertisers) little wasted watching. Because that advertising time can be sold at a higher ate by the media, we can say that the audience organized in this manner watches harder and with more intensity and efficiency. In fact, because the value of the time goes up, necessary watching-time decreases, and surplus watching-time increases, thus leading to relative surplus value.
The other major way in which relative surplus value operates in the media is through the division of time. [...]
reminds me of a tweet by Ben Tarnoff (drawing on his & Moira's article about SV being unable to fix itself?) about FB needing to deepen extraction of value (since they cant spread beyond a certain point of penetration - limited by pop growth at their current scale)
for the division of time thing - think about how ads are shown every x tweets/posts/messages. the longer you scroll the more ads you see. they cram in a lot of diff ads rather than forcing you to linger on each (more profitable for them? cus more competition)
[...] the early history of industrial capitalism is tied up with attempts by capital to extend the time of the working day in an absolute sense, thus manipulating the ratio between necessary time and surplus time. [...]
However, as Marx realized, this absolute extension of the working day cannot go on indefinitely. Unions and collective bargaining limited the length of the working day, forcing capital to increase the intensity of labor. The concept of relative surplus value initially meant the cheapening of consumer goods that reproduce labor-power, so that the amount of necessary time would be decreased. [...]
connects very nicely with the increased ratio of ads-to-content (Google search - find diagram; FB news feed and messenger)
diss: relevant to abolition (union of users?)
[...] Despite the fact that huge amounts of money (much more than programming) are spent on producing attractive commercials, people do all they can to avoid them. [...]
These findings have not been lost on the advertising or television industries, who have increasingly recognized that the traditional concept of a ratings point may no longer be valid. Ratings measure program watching rather than commercial watching. Indeed, it seems that there is much disparity between the two, and advertisers are starting to voice their discontent at having to pay for viewers who may not be watching their ads at all. [...]
AD BLOCKING!! so much to say on this. think about the war between FB and adblockers, and cus FB (etc) has much greater resources, it'll always win. try to find sources claiming that adblockers either sell data or collude?
also: find the bit in Chaos Monkeys where he talks about adblocking as being theft, lmao