by
Astra Taylor
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The professions, as many others have observed, have served as a kind of “class fortress,” excluding talented, motivated people in service of monopolistic self-preservation. (“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution” is known in tech circles as the Shirky principle.) [...]
extremely true of tech too tho lmao
Of course the advertisers themselves want nothing more than for all of us to encounter their offerings, to “engage” and “interact” with them. We have known for years that culture can be a commodity even when you don’t have to pay for it outright. Those who would protect the cultural commons must see that the challenge is not only copyright, but those who own the platforms and channels through which culture is increasingly shared. On their watch, the cultural commons has become little more than a radically discounted shopping mall, a consumers’ paradise of free entertainment propped up by advertising. What’s being hoarded now are the means of delivery, the channels through which the economic value of culture is realized. The commons can be commodified without being enclosed outright.
Cohen is highlighting a value that has long been central to any progressive movement: respect for labor. From this angle, it’s clear that “copyleft,” as the free culture position on copyright is sometimes called, is not “left” in the traditional sense. As Richard Stallman told me, he designed copyleft to ensure the freedom of users to redistribute and modify copies of software. Freedom to tinker is the paramount value it promotes, but a left worthy of the name has to balance that concern with the demand for equality, for parity of wealth and redistribution of power.
Copyleft, with its narrow emphasis on software freedom, even when broadened to underscore the freedom of speech implications of such a position, offers a limited political response to entrenched systems of economic privilege, and it does not advance limits on profitability or promote fair compensation. Free culture, with its emphasis on access, does not necessarily lead to a more just social order. To pay to watch an independent movie does not mean capitulating to the privatization of knowledge but rather recognizes the work that went into making it and provides some support so that the effort can continue.33
The commons are accessed asymmetrically, like the massive repositories of genomic data that have been made available online by scientists who hoped the repositories would become a “global resource, shared equally,” but which have been overwhelmingly used by private biotech firms in a handful of wealthy countries. The romance of the commons—the idea that a resource open to all will be accessed equitably and create a more just outcome, that differences evaporate online, openness ensures fairness, and the goods can be “free” to all without negative consequence—ignores the problem of inequality. In reality, differing circumstances, abilities, assets, and power render some better able to take advantage of a commons than others.
Marketers, understandably, have never wanted to underwrite an independent content industry, but in the wake of the quiz show scandal they had no choice. Because newspapers, television channels, and radio stations controlled access to audiences, advertisers were strong-armed into ponying up money that funded investigative journalism and educational programming. In the analog world, publishers and broadcasters bundled people into audiences, which they sold to advertisers. But in a digital world, advertisers can “buy the audience without the publication.” The sorts of people who read the New York Times, the Nation, or Cat Fancy can be reached outside of those channels, bought and sold elsewhere on the Web at a fraction of the price, with the revenue going into other pockets.
quoting from this 2012 Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/im-being-followed-how-google-151-and-104-other-companies-151-are-tracking-me-on-the-web/253758/
While it may look like we are getting something for nothing, advertising-financed culture is not free. We pay environmentally, we pay with our self-esteem, and we pay with our attention, privacy, and knowledge. But we also pay with our pocketbooks, and this is key. Advertising is, in essence, a private tax. Because promotional budgets are factored into the price we pay for goods, customers end up footing the bill. That means that, all together, we spend more than $700 billion a year on advertising, a tremendous waste of money on something that has virtually no social value and that most of us despise.
Advertising, after all, doesn’t feed or house us, or educate us, or enlighten us, or make our lives better or more beautiful. Instead, advertising makes our culture less spirited and fearless, more servile and uninspired. Surely all that money could be better spent producing something we actually care about.
Put simply, a poor person has not been allocated the stuff (or the ability to buy it) that a rich person has. The needs of the rich and poor are met and unmet in wildly different ways: the potential to fully articulate their humanity is cut off at the root for some, while others are granted space to flourish. Inequality limits what a person, and indeed society, could otherwise do; it delimits our freedom. Past generations have fought to expand the realm of freedom—to ensure all adult humans have the same rights and to ensure that any new capabilities delivered through technological advance are to be made available to all. And if we are to continue this battle to correct the titanic, manifest unfairness of the way things are, we must therefore wage a struggle over which method for the allocation of things we want as a society.
The technique, a type of vendor-managed inventory, works to minimize what businesses call the “bullwhip effect,” the free market’s kissing cousin to Stalinism’s shortage problem. First identified in 1961, the bullwhip effect describes the phenomenon of increasingly wild swings in mismatched inventories against product demand the further one moves along the supply chain toward the producer, ultimately extending to the company’s extraction of raw materials. Therein, any slight change in customer demand reveals a discord between what the store has and what the customers want, meaning there is either too much stock or too little.
To illustrate the bullwhip effect, let’s consider the “too-little” case (although the phenomenon works identically in either scenario). The store readjusts its orders from the distributor to meet the increase in customer demand. But by this time, the distributor has already bought a certain amount of supply from the wholesaler, and so it has to readjust its own orders from the wholesaler—and so on, through to the manufacturer and the producer of the raw materials. Because customer demand is often fickle and its prediction involves some inaccuracy, businesses will carry an inventory buffer called “safety stock.” Moving up the chain, each node will observe greater fluctuations, and thus greater requirements for safety stock. One analysis performed in the 1990s assessed the scale of the problem to be considerable: a fluctuation at the customer end of just 5 percent (up or down) will be interpreted by other supply chain participants as a shift in demand of up to 40 percent.
like the butterfly effect but for supply chains i guess
But there’s a catch—a big one for those who defend the market as the optimal mechanism for allocation of resources: the bullwhip effect is, in principle, eliminated if all orders match demand perfectly for any period. And the greater the transparency of information throughout the supply chain, the closer this result comes to being achieved. Thus, planning, and above all trust, openness and cooperation along the supply chain—rather than competition—are fundamental to continuous replacement. This is not the “kumbaya” analysis of two socialist writers; even the most hard-hearted commerce researchers and company directors argue that a prerequisite of successful supply chain management is that all participants in the chain recognize that they all will gain more by cooperating as a trusting, information-sharing whole than they will as competitors.
[...] Too often we confuse the violence of despots with what makes despotism wrong. But much of this violence is a grotesque tool to enforce submission. It is this unfreedom—unchallengeable control of a human by another—that is the worst crime.