3 ms·

Lanier is one of those bewailing the end of the artistic class... yet this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge - making their prod

Lanier is one of those bewailing the end of the artistic class... yet this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge - making their produce have value. Now that this scarcity is being removed through innovation - they claim that their 'special' insight is going to be lost. Meanwhile - the artists continue to shack up ever closer with 'big content' and their IP lawyers... a group toward which all their romantic cliches espoused the most profound hatred. in depth counterpoint: http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end-of-intimacy-and-the-birth-of-hacker-sensibility/ http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/11/the-social-network-the-end...

psykotic 16y ago
> yet this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge - making their produce have value. Could you explain more? If this class only transmitted knowledge without insight from the enlightened to the ignorant, I could see your point. The intellectual class has been permeable for a long time. Even in the very old days, a gifted boy from a humble background could become a man of the cloth, making a good livelihood while pursuing his intellectual interests. Reading and writing was in short supply for most of the Middle Ages, but by Shakespeare's time many boys and girls received a solid basic education, if only "small Latin and less Greek". The university system of the twentieth century created an academic class that unfortunately became nigh-synonymous with intellectuals. But people like that are paid employees who don't depend on writing for the general public. Lanier must be referring to another kind, the proverbial struggling writers. Maybe I'm blinded, but I certainly don't see how they rely on a general scarcity of knowledge to provide value!
- wdewind 16y ago
  I would replace scarcity of knowledge with scarcity of information/media in general and expand this to the entire media industry. For years television companies paid top dollar for content so that they could create crowds for their advertisers. Because there were very few people capable of even reaching a large crowd (ie: there were large distribution barriers), there was, relative to now, a scarcity of media in this arena. Provided you got the right distribution, it didn't really matter what you put out there because there were so few people capable of operating at scale (again this goes for all industries, from Hollywood to journos). I did a lot of consulting for Time Warner about 2 years ago, and one of the things I heard their executives say over and over again was "We think there will always be a market for our premium content." They fundamentally failed to understand their business model: they thought it was providing high quality content to build crowds for advertisers, while in fact it had nothing to do with the content (the content was just the means, not the ends). In this sense Google is their prime competition (same ends, far cheaper means), and is absolutely eating their lunch. The other thing they didn't understand is that people simply don't have the hours in the day anymore. If 10 years ago you watched 10 hours of television a week, it's likely you now spend some portion of that on Facebook, youtube, blogs or some other media outlet that we consider "user generated." This hurt television more than the industry thought it would, again, due to the the fact that they were winning in distribution much more than quality, like they thought, and because as advertising approaches a zero-sum game linearly, the prices grow exponentially. Now that it is easier to capture the long tail cheaply, and to more directly target consumers, what traditional media companies have offered (the distribution mechanism) is no longer valuable. As a content filter, the publishing houses have always been crap, they just didn't know it. The industry optimized years ago for this inability to hit the long tail: the information provided is extremely abstracted in order to provide mass appeal. Taking NYTimes as an example, general news source dominance led them again to optimize for what they THOUGHT was quality winning: they hired the best journos they could find, instead of industry experts with writing skills. When blogs allowed these industry experts to easily distribute their own work, the middle man was removed. Now these companies are so big and have optimized everything from their recruiting processes to their syndication for this model: high quality journos, high quality content. They are too big, and it's become very difficult for them to pivot. This phenomenon is easily transferrable to almost all media industries, and is the general "cheapening" (I would call market-readjustment) of the value of media. It turns out people have more specific taste than the media industry gave them credit for (or was able to serve), and now that these specific tastes are easily served, the general, abstracted versions of these media have lost tremendous value. Hope that makes sense, /rant.
  - psykotic 16y ago
    Thanks for the long post! That makes a lot more sense. I would say it's less that there was a scarcity of media in the past and more that there is now an unprecendented and almost inconceivable overabundance of media. People gorge themselves on crap and have no remaining appetite to savor delicacies. But that might just be my provincial and elitist 20th century point of view. Anyway, we seem to basically agree.
stcredzero 16y ago
this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge...they claim that their 'special' insight is going to be lost Actually, in the age of the Internet and Google, special insight is precisely the scarce product amongst all of the unfiltered information. Someone should do a "rotten tomatoes" for prognostication and taste making. Prediction markets may already fit this.

psykotic 16y ago

> yet this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge - making their produce have value. Could you explain more? If this class only transmitted knowledge without insight from the enlightened to the ignorant, I could see your point. The intellectual class has been permeable for a long time. Even in the very old days, a gifted boy from a humble background could become a man of the cloth, making a good livelihood while pursuing his intellectual interests. Reading and writing was in short supply for most of the Middle Ages, but by Shakespeare's time many boys and girls received a solid basic education, if only "small Latin and less Greek". The university system of the twentieth century created an academic class that unfortunately became nigh-synonymous with intellectuals. But people like that are paid employees who don't depend on writing for the general public. Lanier must be referring to another kind, the proverbial struggling writers. Maybe I'm blinded, but I certainly don't see how they rely on a general scarcity of knowledge to provide value!

wdewind 16y ago
I would replace scarcity of knowledge with scarcity of information/media in general and expand this to the entire media industry. For years television companies paid top dollar for content so that they could create crowds for their advertisers. Because there were very few people capable of even reaching a large crowd (ie: there were large distribution barriers), there was, relative to now, a scarcity of media in this arena. Provided you got the right distribution, it didn't really matter what you put out there because there were so few people capable of operating at scale (again this goes for all industries, from Hollywood to journos). I did a lot of consulting for Time Warner about 2 years ago, and one of the things I heard their executives say over and over again was "We think there will always be a market for our premium content." They fundamentally failed to understand their business model: they thought it was providing high quality content to build crowds for advertisers, while in fact it had nothing to do with the content (the content was just the means, not the ends). In this sense Google is their prime competition (same ends, far cheaper means), and is absolutely eating their lunch. The other thing they didn't understand is that people simply don't have the hours in the day anymore. If 10 years ago you watched 10 hours of television a week, it's likely you now spend some portion of that on Facebook, youtube, blogs or some other media outlet that we consider "user generated." This hurt television more than the industry thought it would, again, due to the the fact that they were winning in distribution much more than quality, like they thought, and because as advertising approaches a zero-sum game linearly, the prices grow exponentially. Now that it is easier to capture the long tail cheaply, and to more directly target consumers, what traditional media companies have offered (the distribution mechanism) is no longer valuable. As a content filter, the publishing houses have always been crap, they just didn't know it. The industry optimized years ago for this inability to hit the long tail: the information provided is extremely abstracted in order to provide mass appeal. Taking NYTimes as an example, general news source dominance led them again to optimize for what they THOUGHT was quality winning: they hired the best journos they could find, instead of industry experts with writing skills. When blogs allowed these industry experts to easily distribute their own work, the middle man was removed. Now these companies are so big and have optimized everything from their recruiting processes to their syndication for this model: high quality journos, high quality content. They are too big, and it's become very difficult for them to pivot. This phenomenon is easily transferrable to almost all media industries, and is the general "cheapening" (I would call market-readjustment) of the value of media. It turns out people have more specific taste than the media industry gave them credit for (or was able to serve), and now that these specific tastes are easily served, the general, abstracted versions of these media have lost tremendous value. Hope that makes sense, /rant.
- psykotic 16y ago
  Thanks for the long post! That makes a lot more sense. I would say it's less that there was a scarcity of media in the past and more that there is now an unprecendented and almost inconceivable overabundance of media. People gorge themselves on crap and have no remaining appetite to savor delicacies. But that might just be my provincial and elitist 20th century point of view. Anyway, we seem to basically agree.

stcredzero 16y ago

this is a class that thrived essentially on the scarcity of knowledge...they claim that their 'special' insight is going to be lost Actually, in the age of the Internet and Google, special insight is precisely the scarce product amongst all of the unfiltered information. Someone should do a "rotten tomatoes" for prognostication and taste making. Prediction markets may already fit this.