5 ms·

They cite Ben Bagdikian the writer of "The New Media Monopoly" a decent book exposing the relationships between advertisers and media companies albeit his liber

They cite Ben Bagdikian the writer of "The New Media Monopoly" a decent book exposing the relationships between advertisers and media companies albeit his liberal perspective makes him incapable of realizing that this is inherent to the capitalist mode of production of media (like most of the people on this site). It is an unavoidable circumstance of this mode of production, it is the root of fake news and propaganda, and legislation cannot stop it.

leobg 5y ago
That’s a bit like saying that democracy is bound to lead to Hitler. For, just like capitalism favors anything that gets clicked, democracy favors anyone who makes the boldest promises.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  H.L. Mencken's prediction in "Bayard vs. Lionheart" (1924) held up well: https://amomai.blogspot.com/2008/10/hl-mencken-bayard-vs-lionheart.html https://amomai.blogspot.com/2008/10/hl-mencken-bayard-vs-lio...
- Atlas667 5y ago
  That's a bit of a stretch. I am obfuscating all the necessary technological and societal steps that lead to advertising supply and demand. I am saying it is unavoidable/irrevocable now. Not that every instantiation of capitalism leads to this, but it has done so here and now and it cannot be undone. Advertorials are the bread and butter of marketing and manipulation today. Be it by the CIA, Exxon or any new trendy technology or software startup. In private media there cannot be objectivity. That is unavoidable.
  - leobg 5y ago
    It seems to me that a big part of the problem is a lopsided development of the internet and of computer tech. Specifically: The focus on clicks as a proxy for value. And the lack of a native system for payment. 1) Focus on clicks and attention The internet pioneers of the 1960s had the vision that a computer would learn facts. The idea would be that a future internet would be immune to false ideas. Computers would be able to merge the world‘s fractured knowledge. People would instantly know the best answers to any question they would come across, and not waste their time anymore with blind alleys, or with ideas that someone else, anywhere on Earth and at any time in history, had already falsified. Humanity would be free to work at the cutting edge, pursuing only those questions which truly haven‘t been answered yet. Now, this is not what we got. At all. What we got instead is clickbaity articles and FUD. Not what is true propagates on the internet. But what gets clicked. Why is it that way? Because we never cracked the nut of a computer bringing together facts from the real world. The best „AI“ we got is stuff like GPT-3... which is essentially a parrot that has learned a bunch of song lyrics well enough to fool you into thinking that it can speak. Our computers just cannot tell facts from fiction. Worse yet, our best language models actually create more fiction, fiction that is harder and harder to distinguish from facts. It‘s precisely because we haven‘t solved this technical problem that we are resorting to human clicks as the currency of the internet. Which is, of course, a terrible proxy for truth and value. 2) Lack of a payment system And the second big factor, I believe, is payment: Payment was supposed to be an integral part of the internet. There‘s even a status code in the HTTP protocol to this day that means „Payment required“. But payments never got implemented as a feature of the internet itself. Instead, you needed a merchant account to receive payments. Which lead to a system where a few large companies get to collect real money. And everyone else needs to find some other way of monetizing their service. Which, for many, became: Running ads. Since then, we got a few improvements. PayPal tried to fill the hole. But they got acquired by eBay, and eBay never bothered to make PayPal into the central money system of the internet. Now the contenders in this space are Stripe and cryptocurrencies. But none of them have, so far, remedied the central flaw of the internet, which is that getting paid for your services is still a hassle. Frictionless payment only works in walled gardens like Apple‘s App Store, or on Amazon. But if you publish a blog post, and you‘d like to charge like $0.50 for your article, you‘re out of luck. It‘s not that nobody would pay you. It‘s that the act of paying would be such a hassle - requiring registration, email confirmation, payment data, etc. - that consumers just give up. Hence the only way for smaller providers to monetize their content is to a) join a walled garden and become a modern day serf, or b) run ads (or sell user data for the purpose of running ads).
- coldtea 5y ago
  Well, the difference is that while democracy can lead to Hitler eventually, it can also keep them in check (whereas non-democratic rule can more easily captured and kept by potential Hitlers). Whereas capitalism can't keep itself in check (democracy might keep it, though).

leobg 5y ago

That’s a bit like saying that democracy is bound to lead to Hitler. For, just like capitalism favors anything that gets clicked, democracy favors anyone who makes the boldest promises.

dredmorbius 5y ago
H.L. Mencken's prediction in "Bayard vs. Lionheart" (1924) held up well: https://amomai.blogspot.com/2008/10/hl-mencken-bayard-vs-lionheart.html https://amomai.blogspot.com/2008/10/hl-mencken-bayard-vs-lio...
Atlas667 5y ago
That's a bit of a stretch. I am obfuscating all the necessary technological and societal steps that lead to advertising supply and demand. I am saying it is unavoidable/irrevocable now. Not that every instantiation of capitalism leads to this, but it has done so here and now and it cannot be undone. Advertorials are the bread and butter of marketing and manipulation today. Be it by the CIA, Exxon or any new trendy technology or software startup. In private media there cannot be objectivity. That is unavoidable.
- leobg 5y ago
  It seems to me that a big part of the problem is a lopsided development of the internet and of computer tech. Specifically: The focus on clicks as a proxy for value. And the lack of a native system for payment. 1) Focus on clicks and attention The internet pioneers of the 1960s had the vision that a computer would learn facts. The idea would be that a future internet would be immune to false ideas. Computers would be able to merge the world‘s fractured knowledge. People would instantly know the best answers to any question they would come across, and not waste their time anymore with blind alleys, or with ideas that someone else, anywhere on Earth and at any time in history, had already falsified. Humanity would be free to work at the cutting edge, pursuing only those questions which truly haven‘t been answered yet. Now, this is not what we got. At all. What we got instead is clickbaity articles and FUD. Not what is true propagates on the internet. But what gets clicked. Why is it that way? Because we never cracked the nut of a computer bringing together facts from the real world. The best „AI“ we got is stuff like GPT-3... which is essentially a parrot that has learned a bunch of song lyrics well enough to fool you into thinking that it can speak. Our computers just cannot tell facts from fiction. Worse yet, our best language models actually create more fiction, fiction that is harder and harder to distinguish from facts. It‘s precisely because we haven‘t solved this technical problem that we are resorting to human clicks as the currency of the internet. Which is, of course, a terrible proxy for truth and value. 2) Lack of a payment system And the second big factor, I believe, is payment: Payment was supposed to be an integral part of the internet. There‘s even a status code in the HTTP protocol to this day that means „Payment required“. But payments never got implemented as a feature of the internet itself. Instead, you needed a merchant account to receive payments. Which lead to a system where a few large companies get to collect real money. And everyone else needs to find some other way of monetizing their service. Which, for many, became: Running ads. Since then, we got a few improvements. PayPal tried to fill the hole. But they got acquired by eBay, and eBay never bothered to make PayPal into the central money system of the internet. Now the contenders in this space are Stripe and cryptocurrencies. But none of them have, so far, remedied the central flaw of the internet, which is that getting paid for your services is still a hassle. Frictionless payment only works in walled gardens like Apple‘s App Store, or on Amazon. But if you publish a blog post, and you‘d like to charge like $0.50 for your article, you‘re out of luck. It‘s not that nobody would pay you. It‘s that the act of paying would be such a hassle - requiring registration, email confirmation, payment data, etc. - that consumers just give up. Hence the only way for smaller providers to monetize their content is to a) join a walled garden and become a modern day serf, or b) run ads (or sell user data for the purpose of running ads).
coldtea 5y ago
Well, the difference is that while democracy can lead to Hitler eventually, it can also keep them in check (whereas non-democratic rule can more easily captured and kept by potential Hitlers). Whereas capitalism can't keep itself in check (democracy might keep it, though).