content as capital
on the state of content as an industry and machine for makers, creators, influencers, and users across the internet
Keely Adler and
content as capital
That's why we have intermediaries, and why disintermediation always leads to some degree of re-intermediation. There's a lot of explicit and implicit knowledge and specialized skill required to connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, and other sides of two-sided markets. Some producers can do some of this stuff for themselves, and a... See more
Cory Doctorow • Pluralistic: Middlemen Without Enshittification; The Bezzle Excerpt
Much of the pleasure of “generating content” — whether through a machine or by some other means, about oneself or about other things or about other things as a way to signify oneself — is in imagining that someone else might also want it. The content is not just for you to consume but to anchor shared experience, or at least allow us to imagine its... See more
Rob Horning • Practico-inertia
The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to... See more
theverge.com • Welcome to Hell, Elon - The Verge
What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply chain.
Traditional economic theory assumes information flows serve resource allocation. But increasingly, resource allocation serves attention flows. We've moved from an economy where attention supports... See more
Traditional economic theory assumes information flows serve resource allocation. But increasingly, resource allocation serves attention flows. We've moved from an economy where attention supports... See more
kyla scanlon • Trump, Mamdani, and Cluely
Perhaps this pattern of radicalisation followed by recuperation has even happened with each emergent technology – newspapers, novels, film, (pirate) radio, the Internet. Each time, the new medium has a progressive force, dehabituating people from expected relations, offering new channels for experimental activity, mediatised subcultures, and the... See more
Andy McLaverty-Robinson • Walter Benjamin: Art, Aura and Authenticity | Ceasefire Magazine
I think the defining economic reality of the modern platform media world is that all the platforms realized that an infinite supply of teenage creators are cheaper to deal with than media companies or groups of media individuals or powerful creators. And I’m curious for your read on the number of YouTubers that you see retiring or taking a step... See more