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
The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.
theverge.com • Welcome to Hell, Elon - The Verge
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
this. Before you read anything, ask what are the incentives of the person writing jt
On top of dealing with the actual content, moderators are probably using an interface that hasn’t been updated recently, because engineering resources go toward developing new products and functionality for customers. Improving the experience for content moderators is never at the top of a company’s to-do list. For example, an old interface might... See more