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[...] We're certain that our tech giants achieved their dominance fairly and squarely through the free market, by dint of technical genius. To conjure this image of meritocratic triumph requires overlooking several pungent truths about the nature of these new monopolies. Their dominance is less than pure. They owe their dominance to innovation, but also to tax avoidance. [...] Unlike manufacturing or finance, tech doesn't need to be pinned to a geographic home. Tech companies can transfer their core assets, their intellectual property, to whatever tax haven offers the sweetest deal. They have hatched schemes that their competitors--brick-and-mortar firms, media companies--couldn't dare attempt.
ok im hardly an apologist for these companies but like tax avoidance is the smallest part of why they've achieved so much ... whether they achieved it "fairly and squarely through the free market" only matters if we accept that the market itself is perfect, which imo is a belief that more and more people are starting to question
It's a basic, intuitive right, worthy of enshrinement: Citizens, not the corporations that stealthily track them, should own their own data. The law should demand that these companies treat this data with the greatest care, because it doesn't belong to them. Possessing our data is a heavy responsibility that must come with ethical obligations. The American government has a special category for corporations that profit from goods that they don't truly own: We call them trustees. This is how the government treats radio and television broadcasters. [...]
Because circulation was never a profitable business, the Internet hardly required a large leap of imagination. Instead of selling journalism to readers at a loss, media would give it away for nothing. Media executives bet everything on a fantasy: Publishing free articles on the Internet would enable newspapers and magazines to increase their readership manifold; advertising riches would follow the audience growth. [...]
It might have worked, were it not for Google and Facebook. Newspapers and magazines assumed that the Web would be like a giant newsstand--and readers would remain attached to the sterling reputations of their titles, their distinctive sensibility, and brand-name writers. The new megaportals changed all that. They became the entry point for the Internet--and when readers entered, they hardly paid attention to the names attached to the journalism they read.
With their enormous scale, Facebook and Google could undercut media, selling ad space for phenomenally little because they had nearly infinite windows of display. Since they specialized in collecting data on their users, they could guarantee advertisers a precisely micro-targeted audience. [...]
Advertising has become an unwinnable battle. Facebook and Google will always beat media. Between 2006 and 2017, advertiser spending on newspapers dropped by nearly 75 percent, with most of that money redirected to Facebook and Google. Money shifted because the tech monopolists simply do a much better job of steadily holding the attention of audiences.
[...] let's stop rationalizing the inane economics of magazines and newspapers. It's silly to assert that information wants to be free. That was a piece of nineties pablum that has survived far too long. Consumers have no inherent problem paying for words, so long as publishers place a price tag on them.
I mean ... consumers also don't have a problem paying for water but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be free????
The fact that Internet surveillance isn't totalitarian, however, doesn't mean that it does us no harm. We're watched so that we can be manipulated. Some of this manipulation is welcome. We might revel in algorithmic recommendation of music, we're pleased to be shown an advertisement for sneakers, we need computer help sifting through the mass of information. but there's another way to describe the convenience of the machine: It is the surrender of free will--algorithms make choices for us. This isn't so terrible, because our submission to manipulation is largely willing. Yet we rightly have a sense that we're surrendering far more than we intend and that we're being manipulated far more than we know.
[...] The biggest tech companies are, among other things, the most powerful gatekeepers the world has ever known. Google helps us sort the Internet by providing a sense of hierarchy to information; Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to sort the news we encounter; Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market.
EDEL: I believe the secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip. The difference between one kind of biographer and another may be measured by the quantity of poetry infused into the narrative of life and doing—the poetry of existence, of trial and error, initiation and discovery, rites of passage and development, the inevitabilities of aging, or the truncatedlives, Keats, Byron and others, who died young and yet somehow burned like bright flames. This kind of writing requires patience, assiduity, also enthusiasm, feeling, and certainly a sense of the biographer’s participation. The biographer is a presence in life-writing, in charge of handling the material, establishing order, explaining and analyzing the ambiguities and anomalies. Biography is dull if it’s just dates and facts: it has for too long ignored the entire province of psychology and the emotions. Ultimately, there must be a sense of the inwardness of human beings as well as outwardness: the ways in which we make dreams into realities,the way fantasies become plays and novels and poems—or the general who fights a great battle, Nelson and Trafalgar, Wellington and Waterloo, Washington and Valley Forge, the defeated Napoleon and his Waterloo—the strivings and the failings. It involves finding the links between the body and the spirit or soul in which human beings seem to rise above weakness and struggle.
INTERVIEWER: Did you ever feel like arguing with James?
EDEL: Not often. I did like his balanced view of life, his calm, his general “cool” compared to my own impulsive way of approaching life. But I think I can best answer your question by telling you the one dream I had about him.I never dreamed about him when I was working on the biography. But when I had finished, I one day dreamed I was a journalist again and with a group of journalists at Lamb House, his country house in Sussex. | remember that in the dream I was worried what he might think about all I had written about him. I hung back, and when the rest of the press went away I walked into his study. He was sitting behind his desk. I sat down and said,“Mr. James, I must tell you, I’ve had great difficulties establishing the hierarchies of your friendships.” He looked sadly at me and replied, “You know, I never got them sorted out myself.’ ]think what I did in that dream was to give myself James’s blessing. The dream also enunciated a biographical truth. The subject of a biography has never had a chance to bring order to a life so constantly lived and involved in action. It is the biographer who finds the frame,sorts things out, and for better or worse tries to bring order into life story—create a sense of sequence and coherence.
i love this
INTERVIEWER: You've often said that you think poetry should be ‘‘chiefly hair-raising.” At the same time, however, you’ve spoken of the desirability of a strong bond between the poet and the community he lives in—a bond that you seem to believe has been broken in modern times. Do you see any contradiction or tension between such social concern and the requirement that poetry be, above all, hair-raising?
FITZGERALD: Well, don’t we have Emily Dickinson, the wondrous lady of Amherst, as an authority for that: ‘It’s a poem if it makes you feel as though your head were taken off’? And A. E.. Houseman: ‘If while I am shaving a line of poetry strays into my mind, my beard bristles so that I can’t cut it’? This is an extreme, and this kind of poetry is part of the extreme literary experience—extreme both for the maker and for the reader. That’s at one end of the spectrum. At the other end there is Dryden, sitting in his coffeehouse, turning out couplets to insult someone whom he feels like insulting. So, one has the gamut between what is essentially a private, we might say a metaphysical experience, and the other which is simply a refinement of prose—verse devoted to wit, or to the quotidian purpose of making something clear or making somebody ashamed, of exposing somebody, of putting into a witty form someone’s foibles . . . which can be read with amusement and without a touch of the other extreme, which is private and rare and precious. I don’t see why we can’t live with a decent consciousness of these two poles of poetic experience. I once said, too, that poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation. That says it pretty well—“‘is at least an elegance’— something that is well-formed, readable, and then again something that takes you up.
[...] I’ve thought quite a lot about the issue of fiction and journalism as two possible ways of presenting realities of life, particularly such harsh ones as we’ve encountered in my lifetime. Fiction is the more attractive to me, because if a novelist succeeds, he can enable the reader to identify with the characters of the story, to become the characters of the story, almost, in reading. Whereas in journalism, the writer is always mediating between the material and the reader; the reader is conscious of the journalist presenting material to him. This was one of the reasons why I had experimented with the devices of fiction in doing journalism, in the hopes that my mediation would, ideally, disappear. I believe that the reader is not conscious of the writer of fiction, except through the author’s voice—that is, you are conscious of the person behind the work. But in journalism you are conscious of the person in the work, the person who’s writing it and explaining to you what’s taken place. So my hope was, by using the tricks and the ways of fiction, to be able to eliminate that mediation and have the reader directly confronted by the characters. In this case, my hope was that the reader would be able to become the characters enough to suffer some of the pain, some of the disaster, and therefore realize it.