January 21, 2012

Why the GOP Primary is Giving the Party Ulcers

It's nothing new. In a two-party system, the parties are necessarily going to have to be composed of disparate ideological strands, often knit together by nothing more than detestation for "the other side."

Democrats have it, too. We have our incrementalists, our visionaries, our single-issue fanatics (on a whole range of issues,) and plenty more. We've struggled, in the past, to integrate "New Left" tropes into "Old Left" complacency, to deal with visionaries for whose vision large numbers of Democrats were by no means ready, to strike balances and compromise between passionately-motivated segments with conflicting passions.

It's the nature of politics.

But rarely have the component parts of a major political party been so sharply delineated and so mutually hostile as with the three versions of Republican ideologue. And rarely have the resources and passion lined up so strongly behind each strain of ideology, fighting for the soul of the Party so vigorously that they are in danger of totally eviscerating it, leaving a bloodied corpse on the voting-booth floor.

The 2012 Primary is coming down to the wire, and the three remaining standard-bearers in the intra-Party contest show no disposition to concede and no respect for "Party Unity."

But Mitt and Newt and Rick, each cognomened in his own sharp monosyllable, are the very souls of conciliation and reason compared to their followers.

Rick's believers are doing The Will of a narrow, fanatical, vengeful God who will smite them (and all of us!), root and branch, if they continue to fail to bring about the conditions necessary for the Millenial Apotheosis.

The plutocratic Oligarchs who have been forced to take shelter in Mitt's wake have woken up to the threats of the populist resurgence, and they have unlimited money and unlimited will to throw it into The Cause.

And the neocon loons forced to make do with Newt as the last remaining and marginally credible loon in the race have long experience at all-out, total dirty-tricks political war and no inhibitions whatsoever.

From this side of the aisle it's difficult to discern which of the three might be infinitesimally less terrifying as an occupant of the Oval Office, but the followers of each have no doubts. It's Their Guy. And, by corollary, they Must Defeat The Other Two. Only their own standard-bearer holds out any hope at all to save them from the horror of more slow, incremental progress toward the re-establishment of a working economy and a barely functional body politic, a fate worse than nuclear annihilation and the zombie apocalypse combined.

Somewhere in the bowels of a few well-upholstered offices, there lurk the pitiful remnants of the conservative pragmatists who long ago lost control of their party, gnawing their fingernails and compulsively glugging down Pepto-Bismol by the liter. Excuse me-- by the quart, we don't have no truck with those Yerpeen socialist metricists.

They stitched the monster together. They strapped it to the table and poured voltage through it. They rejoiced when the creature broke its bonds and wreaked bloody chaos through the core of America's complacent, politically-unmotivated electorate, pulling waves of torch-waving, pitchfork-bearing mobs in its wake.

Now the creature has turned to devour the laboratory, smash the equipment, and leave the power cables writhing and sparking in the ruins.

Mary Shelley might have been able to muster some sympathy for the dramatic inevitability of their hubristic demise.

But not me.

grimly,
Bright

January 20, 2012

Why protecting the buggy whip industry (again) isn't going to work.

An open letter to Time-Warner, Walt Disney, General Electric, Newscorp, Viacom, et. al., (not to mention HarperCollins, Hearst, and dozens more...)

Dear Content Packagers, Content Distributors, and Content-Provider Exploiters:

The end of the world already happened. You missed it. Or, to put it another way: The entire herd is miles down the road, kicking its heels up. Nailing the barn door shut is, to put it gently, not a terribly productive use of your time.

Let me help you re-think.

Because I know who'll get tossed out of the sleigh first: The schlubs and schlemiels working at the bookstore, doing layouts in a cubicle, packing up film cans for delivery, and generally doing actual work for peanuts in pay while you wring your hands and keen over the diminishing worth of your million-dollar stock options. And while I quite frankly think it would be good for y'all to feel a little of the economic uncertainty and the pain that the rest of us struggle with daily, I'd prefer to limit the damage you'll do in the process to tens of thousands of others.

So let's look at the paleo business model first:
Writers, performers, artists, etc., produced creative output that people wanted-- if they knew about it. But getting that creative output to people who would remunerate the artists, writers, etc., was costly, time consuming, and difficult. And, frankly, not usually a congenial enterprise to people who preferred actually producing the content. It could be done on a very small-scale, retail, one-to-one or one-to-few basis, but that wasn't often enough to keep the musician, painter, poet, etc., in beer and skittles for long.

And thus was born an industry dedicated to packaging and distributing the work of the artists, writers, etc. Entrepreneurs built theaters, bought printing presses, found ways to package and reproduce this creative output in larger quantities to meet larger demands. Other entrepreneurs opened retail shops, set up newsstands, invested in broadcasting equipment, and found ways to take the packaged creative output and put it before larger and larger audiences.

In this paleo business model, the actual producers of the creative output had much to complain about: They had little or no control over the packaging and distribution of their work, unless they happened to be one of the lucky ones who hit it big and could hire their own lawyers and (eventually) agents to keep them from getting too baldly exploited. It wasn't an ideal model. But it kept lots and lots of people employed, and it brought creative output to ever-widening audiences in an ever-expanding array of forms. There were hundreds of publishers, record companies, impresarios, film studios, radio stations, bookstores, etc., all competing both to find the most attractive creative output, and to put it before the largest and most lucrative audiences.

The paleo business model became a victim of emerging mass technologies, the evolving science of artificial demand creation, and the enablement of pro-oligarchic capitalist structures. The modern business model replaced it:

Consolidation and vertical integration produced your huge machines. You now spend vast amounts of money creating a demand for the output of writers, performers, artists, etc.--but only the ones who are willing to be exploited by you or who have some kind of unpredictable, freak success outside your control. Whereupon you bring them into control as soon as possible, on the most favorable terms (for you) that you can manage. You package their work with minimal input from them for minimal cost, and you distribute it through the outlets you own at maximum profit to yourselves.

As you became more and more profitable, you consolidated further, vertically integrated further, and wrote the "suggestions" for intellectual property legislation that would continue to maximize your profit and control of others' creative output. And you solemnly assured the producers of that output that it was their rights you were protecting, because should unauthorized methods of packaging or distribution ever result in putting creative output before audiences that you weren't making vast profits from, the producers of that output would see even the pittance that represented their "ownership" of copyrights and revenues therefrom go poof! and vanish.

There are only a few of you, but you had immense control and immense profit from that control.

But it's a post-modern world now.

The resources required to package and distribute creative output, content for short, no longer require large capital outlays, huge workforces, and highly specialized skills. Anyone with an internet connection can distribute content. And anyone who's willing to learn various software skills (many quite simple) and/or spend modest amounts on widely-available equipment can package that content in high-quality, easily usable forms.

Content producers can (and do) interact directly with consumers. Oh, you can still create demand, with a big enough investment-- but if you can't control the packaging and distribution of the content, why make that investment? One silly home-made video of a kitten can out-"sell" a carefully-crafted corporate-produced meme in a day.

Your control is gone, your vertical integration is meaningless. Your vast profits are AT AN END.

You need a new business model.

There's good news and bad news.

The good news first: There are enormous possibilities in the post-modern world. Unexplored market niches, new wrinkles in packaging and distribution to be discovered, and vast cost savings to be gained by reducing the quantities of static packaging produced (usually expensive!) and moving to inexpensive digital production.

The bad news: It's going to be a long, long, long time before you can re-invent a way to control the system to funnel vast profit margins into the pockets of a few oligarchs. There's still profits to be made-- in improving the quality and accessibility of packaging, in aggregating content for consumers, in segmenting distribution and marketing to niches, in evolving new ways to package and synergize content. But it won't involve control, monopoly, or oligarchy again for a long, long time. Maybe never.

Who's going to make money in the post-modern world?

Content producers, to some extent. Those who produce stellar content will do well, as they have always done. They will find ways to work with packagers and aggregators and marketers and to benefit from broad demand and broad accessibility to their content. The sloggers-- the hard workers in the middle who produce good content and are willing (or driven) to do so in sufficient amounts-- will do alright as well, if they are willing to be a little pro-active in packaging and distributing their own work, and finding new ways to connect with their consumers. The vending machines-- competent producers who will work on demand for others-- will actually do a little better in a demand-rich environment.

Individuals and groups of individuals who find new, creative, accessible, attractive ways to package and distribute digital content, and who are willing to work collegially with content creators, and be alert and responsive to consumers. These will do very well indeed-- but they will require too much agility and internal control to be able to function in an older corporate model. You won't be able to co-opt them.

And a whole new group: Content aggregator/marketers. I don't know the word for them yet, I'm not sure it has been invented. But in a world so dense with digital content in so many forms and varieties, those who find a way to connect consumers easily with the particular types of content they are seeking will do very well indeed. But it's not a market that can be cornered. New sites will constantly be springing up, new people will be innovating ways to present content, locate content, prioritize content, connect people with content.

So it's time to stop chasing down the scattered, frolicking beasties who have already forgotten ever being in your barn, time to stop thinking of new and stouter ways to nail shut the doors to the already-empty building.

The ones who survive will be the ones who adapt to the new reality, not the ones who spend the most money and effort trying to shove the calendar back to 1989.

Just a friendly heads-up.

prognosticatorially,
Bright

January 4, 2012

Despatches from the Nutshell

With election season gearing up, it's a dead cert we're going to have to endure plenty of wackjobbery from the clown car, as one candidate after another is tossed out, run over, backed over, and run over again, all the way down to the final consecration of our beloved Oligarchs' Last, Best Hope to Save the Nation from Obama and runaway socialist/fascist/communist/authoritarian/totalitarian class warfare.

Regardless of who that may be (I have my opinion, but I'm not sayin'...) we are going to hear the same litany of schizophrenic glossolalia over the next few months, hovering around a constellation of targets that include:

God-bothering: Why a Deity that presumably created an incomprehensibly vast universe with billions of stars, forms of life, manifestations of energy, etc., really, really wants this or that individual to win an election in one corner of one planet in one galaxy...

From the Nutshell, best possible response to this drivel: "ummm... yeah. Whatever. I'll check on that next time me and God are discussing the election."

Monging Fear on a (sorry) Biblical scale: Why THE WORLD IS GONNA END!! END, I TELL YOU!!! if this or that individual doesn't win the election.

From the Nutshell, best possible response to this spluttering incoherence: "By election day, our new Silurian Lizard Overlords are already gonna be in charge anyway. Why bother?"

And finally, Severely Witless Intellectual Libertarian Loopitude (SWILL): All of our social and economic problems are the individual's fault. Individuals make bad choices. That's why they get sick, lose jobs, are foreclosed on, can't pay their student loan debt, yaddayaddayadda..."

From the Nutshell, best possible response to this sleazy demagoguery: "The choices we make are limited to the choices we have."

And claiming that we have a "choice" over whether we enjoy social privilege conferred by our parentage, our skin color, our gender, our sexuality, our ancestry, or any other source, is a sure sign that the peddler of this claptrap is taking it deep and loving it, from our Beloved Oligarchs.

Claiming that we have a "choice" over how much and what kind of health care we can afford?

Claiming that we have a "choice" over the quality of the schools our parents have access to?

Claiming that we have a "choice" over whether to accept a job with a seven-figure salary and eight-figure bonuses and stock options, versus minimum wage?

Claiming that we have a "choice" over whether to consume that which is pushed at us by our Corporate Overlords, or invest every waking moment in seeking out and mastering the art of living "off the grid" or "out of the mainstream?"

Claiming that we have a "choice" over whether to commute to work in a cheap, gas-guzzling vehicle or use the abundant, easily-accessed and universally available public transit grid?

Claiming that we have a "choice" about living homeless or in a dangerous situation rather than in a safe, energy-efficient home?

Again: "The choices we make are limited to the choices we have."

From the Nutshell,

aphoristically,
Bright