Mental Landslides. Book Reviews. Oligopolies. (Across the Sundering Seas, #3)
This week, I was deeply engrossed by Alan Jacobs’ The Year of Our Lord 1943. While I have my disagreements with where he lands (see the last issue!), 1943 is still an astoundingly excellent volume—perhaps the single best piece of nonfiction I’ve read in the last half decade. Among other things, more than once it has provoked the strange and wonderful experience that is a significant mental shift. You know the kind, I expect: your view on the world suddenly tilts a little bit, and a whole cascade of ideas (and relations between ideas) shakes loose in the aftermath. If that sounds like a landslide, welcome to my mental life this week.
Needless to say, I recommend the book. I will have more to say about it in the future; much of the essay in this space I am working on will undoubtedly be shaped by those tilts.
Even though I read many fewer articles than I do in a normal week by way of being engrossed in Jacobs’ book, two pieces did catch my attention—both touching in various ways on big picture questions around technology and ethics:
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Jill Abramson's 'Merchants of Truth' and the Catastrophic Collapse of Entitled Print News Media, Sean Cooper, Tablet – a thoroughly scathing review of Abramson's take on her years at the New York Times. I have yet to read Merchants of Truth myself, and so I cannot speak to the accuracy of Cooper’s reading. As with all good criticism, however, the review has bigger concerns than this single book. Cooper is incisive on many of the failures of mainstream journalism over the last several decades. One of the several money quotes:
Those who make culture are inevitably ruined by power and money. Regarding the former, the prestige press of the second half of the 20th century overindulged in the thrill of making news, shaping the national conversation, and generally imagining themselves to be people of great importance—even toppling a perverse president and his henchmen during Watergate. Journalism’s rank and file never became rich, though who cares about money when you can take down the leader of the free world.
See also Ben Thompson’s deep archive on the foibles of legacy news media. He has covered much of the territory walked by Abramson’s book over the last half decade, and “Is BuzzFeed a Tech Company?” is still quite relevant half a decade on; but equally relevant to this discussion was his Weekly Article two weeks ago: “The BuzzFeed Lesson”.
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Speaking of Ben Thompson and media analysis, his take on this week’s news that Spotify acquired podcast startup Gimlet is worth your time: Spotify’s Podcast Aggregation Play – Thompson situates Spotify’s move here into the current context of both Spotify specifically and the podcasting ecosystem more generally. (The discussion of the same territory on this week’s Accidental Tech Podcast is an interesting variation on the same theme.)
The net of it is that Spotify seems to be aiming to intermediate podcasting: to become the equivalent of Google and/or Facebook in the sense that perceived relevance on the internet means catering to those giants. Today, there is no player with that kind of power—and, as an indie podcaster myself, I hope Spotify fails. If I read him rightly, Thompson shares my concerns at least to some degree—but nonetheless has a rather bullish take on Spotify’s game, a take which has far too good a chance of being right for my comfort.
Both of these pieces get at some of the fundamental challenges of working in the media space in the internet era. On the one hand, we have more choices than we could have imagined a generation ago. On the other hand, the very technologies enabling that variety tend very strongly toward winner-take-all outcomes, and to failure—sometimes catastrophic—for existing institutions. If the Industrial Revolution was a fever-dream for would-be monopolists, the Information Revolution must be some kind of acid trip. And the same for anyone discontent with the status quo.
That is not to say we a world dominated by a handful of oligopolies (and with nothing good from the past left at all) is inevitable. It is to say that we have an awful lot of work to do to avoid that world, though. For my part, for starters: none of my podcasts will go in Spotify’s (or Google’s, or Stitcher’s, or anyone else’s) walled gardens. More than that, well… we all have a great deal of imaginative ethical work and some serious movement-building work to do.