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the new knowledge monopolies [...] don't actually produce knowledge; they just sift and organize it. We rely on a small handful of companies to provide us with a sense of hierarchy, to identify what we read and what we should ignore, to pick informational winners and losers. It's incredible economic and cultural power that they have amassed because of a sudden change in the strange economics of the commodity they traffic in, a change they hastened.
attention economy implications!!! and the problem is that these choices are dictated almost purely based on profit-based concerns
[...] Don Graham's grandfather, Eugene Meyer, spoke of his new duties with solemn obligation:
The newspaper's duty is to its readers and to the public at large and not to private interests of its owners. In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such a course be necessary for the public good. The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men.
on the history of the Washington Post. such were the days :')
(the alliance was always uneasy and fraught with danger from the profit motive, but it managed to be held at bay for a while, until the technology caught up ...)
[...] let's not confuse Amazon with a utopian experiment in participatory democracy. Amazon always gives better treatment to some artifacts than others--promoting them in email, on its home page, and through its recommendation algorithms. This is tremendous cultural power, especially given how so many of Amazon's competitors have melted in the face of its size and prowess.
Old gatekeepers might not always have been worthy of praise, but at least there were a lot of them. And in that multiplicity there was the basis for democracy. In Amazon's vision of the future, there's just one gate. And while Jeff Bezos may wave everyone through, the health of the book business has already come to depend on the whims of one company. Even if he were a benevolent monopolist, that would be a terrifying process.
I think he misses the point a bit here--the problem isn't necessarily in the number, it's in the accountability. one gatekeeper could be a lot better than a million if that one isn't driven by desire for greater profits
It wouldn't take much for a search engine to tip public opinion. One study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, attempted to simulate the workings of Google [...] the authors kept reordering search results and then asking respondents to divulge their opinions. Placement in the search engine, it turns out, matters a lot: "On all measures, opinions shifted in the direction of the candidate who was favored in the rankings. Trust, liking and voting preferences all shifted predictably."
paper by Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson, "The Search Engine Manipulation Effect" 2015
The profusion of data has changed the character of journalism. It has turned it into a commodity, something to be marketed, tested, and calibrated. Perhaps media have always thought this way. But if that impulse always existed, it was at least buffered. [...]
tech accelerating, microcosm
The first breach in the barricade is something called "branded content" or "native advertising". [...] It is an ad that is written to resemble journalism--a pseudo-piece about the new scientific consensus [...] the ads are usually produced by the media companies themselves, not an ad agency. [..] There's usually a tag indicating that the article has been "sponsored" or "paid for by advertisers." But it's as discreet as possible, and that's the point. Advertisers will pay a premium for branded content, because it stands such a good chance of confusing the reader into clicking.
These quotidian details matter. Our great writers cared about money because they needed it. They needed it to feed their families, and so that they could devote themselves to fulfilling their creative selves. Without pay, they would have been consigned to day jobs, unable to fully apply themselves to their prose. Apologists for Amazon like to sneer at the writerly caste, a hermetic club that dismisses outsiders who aren't part of the gang. [...]
or just like ... socialism
[...] The Soviet failure cast suspicion on statist solutions. So, the government didn't just privatize the Internet; it self-consciously decided that it would allow it to grow with hardly any government supervision. "I want to create an oasis from regulation in the broadband world," William Kennard, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, declared in 1999, mouthing a familiar sentiment.
[...] Capitalism has always dreamed of activating the desire to consume, the ability to tap the human brain to stimulate its desire for products that it never contemplated needing. Data helps achieve this old dream. It makes us more malleable, easier to addict, prone to nudging. It's the reason that Amazon recommendations for your next purchase so often result in sales, or why Google ads result in clicks.