Creatives: Would you like to better understand why writers & authors (+ musicians and artists) are being squeezed? The impact Amazon has had on the publishing industry, the chequered history of DRM, the dirt on copyright? How about 'how news got broken', 'why streaming doesn't pay' & what people in the creative industries can actually do about the current state of affairs? Highly recommend Choke Point Capitalism (by Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow) as a read. Please ask your local library to get it in too so more people can have access.
This week on my podcast, I read my recent @medium column, "How To Think About #Scraping: In #privacy and #labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best," which proposes ways to retain the benefits of scraping without the privacy and labor harms that sometimes accompany it:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
As #RebeccaGiblin and I write in our book #ChokepointCapitalism, in a market with five giant publishers, four studios, three labels, two app platforms and one ebook/audiobook company, giving creative workers more copyright is like giving your bullied kid extra lunch money. The more money you give that kid, the more money the bullies will take:
This week on my podcast, I read my recent @medium column, "Ideas Lying Around: Milton Friedman was a monster, but he wasn’t wrong about this," which I describe a #TheoryOfChange for unrigging markets, addressing the climate emergency, building worker power and fixing the imbalance between news publishers and #BigTech:
My hoping machine runs on the creation and spreading of ideas lying around. Last year, #RebeccaGiblin and I published #ChokepointCapitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back:
Hey, #Berkeley! I'm appearing again today at #BayBookFest with #WendyLiu (Abolish Silicon Valley) at 11AM at Freight and Salvage to discuss "Chokepoint Capitalism," the book #RebeccaGiblin and I wrote about #monopoly and creative #labor markets. It's free!
The Writers Guild is on strike. Hollywood is closed for business. The union's bargaining documents reveal a cartel of studios that refused to negotiate on a single position. This could go on for a long-ass time:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Now the writers are back on strike and it's triggered a predictable torrent of anti-worker nonsense ("striking writers will lead to public indifference to torture!) (no, really) (ugh):
In 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term "web-log" to describe his website "Robot Wisdom," where he logged his journeys around this exciting new digital space called "the web." Two years later, @peterme shortened "web-blog" to "#blog":
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
In the same week, 7,000 writers - even the ones who weren't getting screwed - fired their agents, and demanded a return to the 90/10 split and a ban on agencies owning studios. The agencies say nfw. The writers stayed on the picket line.