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
The slots that books that connected with readers once occupied are now increasingly occupied by the equivalent of the botshit that fills the first eight screens of your Google search results: book-shaped objects that have gamed their way to the top of the list.
Cory Doctorow • Pluralistic: How a billionaire’s mediocre pump-and-dump “book” became a “bestseller” (15 Feb 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The distinction Wark makes of the vectoralist class vs. the capitalist is its power not to actually own anything but to simply extract enormous profit from various flows of value.
Vince Carducci • To the Vector the Spoils: On McKenzie Wark’s ‘Capital Is Dead’, PopMatters
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
this. Before you read anything, ask what are the incentives of the person writing jt
How do we create a world where we are free to create for the love of it?
Kate Tyson (Strathmann) • The Space to Create
The TikTok War: Why High School & College Kids Are Getting The Wrong Information about Hamas & Israel
I spent the weekend trying to reverse engineer the TikTok algorithm, as I am convinced this is the reason we're losing the information war with high school & college students.
Jeff Morris Jr.x.comwow. this is a very serious problem.
The thing that makes “influencer” such an attractive option in those surveys is precisely this idea that it names the outcome rather than the actual work. We don’t actually have a good word for what it means to do that work. Partly this is because there are big differences between platforms (and within platforms, for that matter), and there is no... See more
Collin Brooke • Unfluence
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