Thats cuz you think of it as a tech/content company, instead of Wall St financializing content.
In the same way they did mortgages. The people who built the houses that were sold to people who couldnt afford them, were also standing around scratching their head.
Its a joke because there is an upper limit to what the world can offer for content. Only the finance robots who run these companies believe it doesnt matter.
After all this time, Netflix hasnt been able to get more than 200-250 million subscribers, even though Startups and CEOs love to bray about how the internet is full of billions of people, just waiting to hand over their cash. The truth is vast ocean of people dont have cash.
And now the market capture phase is complete. The people who can pay, have already been corralled into pens and are milked everyday. The finance class then turns their attention to milking the "subprime" crowd. Give them credit cards. Get the advertisers involved. Reduce the VFX, content creation, animation budgets, layoff those self important expensive engineers.
Such a system doesn't generate software quality beyond a point, cuz it doesn't need it. In a few years Netflix will look like Yahoo.
Tech and Content do not run the world. Finance does. Sooner or later into the ground. Cause the goal of milking cows hits an upper limit.
I know this is asking a lot, but do you have a reading list/ any other type of media format playlist that you want to recommend? I ask because your comment was incisive.
Follow the banter around a single term "Financialization" (setup a google news alert). It will lead you to everything else, including how the financial sectors thinking about it.
In a sense, Wall St. is creating "economic activity" in the hope of future growth and rewards which ends up benefiting common man with digital abundance. Whether Govt does it directly or indirectly in a top down manner, the end result is the same. This is like building digital roads.
How many didnt get famous? Thats what no one reports.
If the UN report on the attention economy is saying 0.5% of content produced is consumed and dropping, then how are people getting views? It doesnt make any sense. Unless the game is rigged.
People have limited attention to give anything but unlimited capacity to receive attention. The platforms are taking full advantage of that fact to keep this ponzi scheme running.
The UN report on the attention economy actually said:
By the 2000s, so much information was being generated
worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015) of the
digital data generated was being analyzed at all.
Where "analyzed" probably means something other than "got any views". In any case, the claim is unsourced, so I wouldn't put much stock in it.
The way I see it, people's ability to give attention is limited, but the ability to do something worth paying attention to is even scarcer, so even the most trivial feat (like writing a comment on HN) is likely to garner at least a few views.
Becoming famous is much harder than getting any views at all, because now you need to do something so attention-grabbing that some of your few initial viewers will tell others about it and your audience size snowballs from there.
as long as you approach this kind of thing with knowledge of how Youtube works, I actually think there's a pretty high chance of success
if you have a good mic and camera, show your face, speak clearly, consistently upload, and - most importantly - you broadly make one-off videos about common denominator subtopics - never going too deep or numbering your videos - then I wouldn't bet against you. there really aren't that many successful science Youtubers
Spam and trolling even happens on a physical newspapers/radio/tv/books/magazines. Its just that you have to pay to do it.
The rich/ceremonial/leisure classes have through out history been constantly spamming everyone with whatever shit occurs to their 3 inch brains, because they can afford to buy the largest amount of attention.
To bad there is not enough attention for anything anymore cause production of content is happening at volumes that dwarf Consumption of content.
If 99% of comments and links on HN are not read by anyone, do you think the great geniuses who run HN will tell you that? Whats the use of such systems no one asks. They want to just keep it alive like some dumb engineers in the control room of Jurassic Park after the children are lost and the T Rex is loose.
The platforms, without knowing what the fuck they are building, have made it Free for everyone to Broadcast. So its now not just the rich who are spamming and trolling. Its everyone. For free. All you get is noise. Read the UN Report on the Attention Economy.
One dimensional software engineers now have capability to build and scale systems quickly. Thats the only reason we have these dumb fucking mindless systems wasting everyones time and energy.
What I want is a "content condensor" tool. Something OSS and mathematically pure that can just take all the signal, drop the noise, and run some NLP to "condense" the information for me to effectively wade through it. Yes, there's a lot of bullshit content now, but there's also a lot of valid content. To be proficient today, we need to be able to swim effectively through the sea.
What's screwed up right now is we are currently forced to rely on 3rd-parties to filter for us, and they do so often poorly by just dropping content that's not "popular" which results in biased sampling, or worse, they select based on some kind of profit motive. Why can't we own our own "social media algorithm" or something? Why do I have to spend so much time consuming? Give me the IV drip, and filter out the unhealthy portion, please. Ideally, I should be able to trust the filter, too.
But of course it would be trivial to modify the llm output, to include random misstakes, if this ever would become a standard way of dealing with bots.
Well someone has to pay for the tech. Its not free. And that puts an automatic upper limit on what happens.
People have no idea how much debt Police depts (lets not even talk about the military) have racked up playing with high tech toys and paying off compensation every 2 days for people they accidentally harm or kill. So whats funny here as Big Bro gets access to more and more tools the more broke he gets.
And guess what the financiers of this debt will do when it cant be paid off. Raid police pension funds. Thats how financialization of public service works
No free lunch big bro. Have fun with all the "cool toys" while the good times last.
What we are missing is industry. People and politicians by themselves really cant take on the financial sector. They are the modern day rent collecting feudal lords.
The Financial Sector(banks/insurers/real estate/stocks/bonds) has a much larger say on the allocation of resources (the economy) than anyone else including politicians and individual corporations.
The counter balance is not just people. It has to come from people+industry. The western industries have basically been hollowed out thanks to financialization.
Even Google and Apple bow to the shareholder. The shareholder doesn't do any actually work, but is sitting on his ass demanding greater rewards even if it means fucking others over, or even the entire system. Same thing with real estate and insurance. So we end up with monopolies.
Now the system is fucked, cause we have already peaked in terms of customers available to milk. Everyone is in debt to keep things afloat. The FED balance sheet has jumped from 900 billion to 9 trillion in mostly junk debt. People/Politicians we already saw during 2008 gfc folded, when they had a real shot at change.
Its in the interest of Google, Apple et al to use their influence to get on the right side of this.
The shareholder of big companies is usually other big companies, universities, or… the people. The people own these things by way of retirement funds, savings accounts, CDs, index funds, etc. It’s just that they are often unaware.
The financial industry definitely has outsized power and charges excessive fees but the situation is not at all as simple as the financial industry owning everything. It’s a complicated web of ownership with finance being deeply embedded within it and controlling a lot of the hubs of the network effect.
VFX makes 0 sense to me as a business especially in todays over saturated content world. I have friends in DNEG were each movie has 100-200 people working on 20-25 minutes worth of footage for an ENTIRE fucking year. Thousands of people basically. And its a coin toss whether these movies are going to get the views.
Whenever I ask them how the fuck can such a business work, they just tell me erm we are just artists and coders. The job pays well so we dont ask the corporate robots too many questions about it.
And I keep pushing them to do so, cuz it doesnt make any sense given the costs involved unless it some elaborate walter white money laundering op.
Very few "best" people/"superstars" have a great track record of doing anything useful outside comfy large corp support structure. Its like moving exotic plants out of a specialized botanical garden.
In the US sure, where its blasphemous to slit the throats of the leisure classes for their excesses. In China they made Jack Ma disappear.
Through out history when it gets time for the Kings & Queens to waive the debt of the plebs away, cause they have nothing left to pay, the Rentier classes take the haircut.
In the US the rentiers have owned the Kings & Queens for a long time. To the point where any American institution cant touch them. This is not the case in China. There will be mass disappearances and cullings (already have been).
Well, start with the first 10, then remaining ones will emigrate and simply assign bounty for any head of CCP member based on the rank - until the Party is eliminated. How about that? Don't underestimate the money - it goes the long way.
Still, human history shows us that money always wins. People have natural instinct to acquire wealth. No political regime has remained viable for a long time if it tried to go against this instinct. Authoritarianism works fine; in fact i am even in a bit of doubt about democracy being the better social order, in any case our empirical data to confirm that is insufficient - but even authoritarian society should exploit, rather that try to suppress, this basic motivator of the people.
So far we can't see CCP making this mistake - which sort of confirms that Party has a healthy self-preservation instinct. Let's say, they are trying to do everything to avoid collapse of real estate prices because that will hit retirement savings of too many people, and they seem to accept lower rates of economic growth if that will be necessary to achieve that.
Still, you need money to control the army and keep it interested. Then there comes a choice of either being unable to do it because of not raising enough cash from society to make a sufficiently big army to keep population in check, being able to have better income they can have in civilian life; or doing it and ruining the competitiveness of the overall economy - like the good old Soviet Union.
Now, in the post-industrial era, we have a third threat. Extinction. And China may actually combine all three.
Money is the force of reason, ignoring it comes at one's own peril regardless of the force one controls: it means going against common sense that established itself through the power of competition, in favour of some arbitrary political theory or just someone's wits. Even if it succeeds for a while, it always reduces overall quality of the system and increases it's vulnerability.
> Still, you need money to control the army and keep it interested.
Making payroll is never an issue for a sovereign that controls a central bank that controls their own currency. You're completely missing the point, because you're thinking in terms of money. A country isn't a business, or a household, it doesn't budget in the way you think.
> Money is the force of reason, ignoring it comes at one's own peril regardless of the force one controls:
Money is a floating-value paper proxy for material wealth. When there's a shortage of material prosperity - when people aren't building stuff, that's when you get a problem. Your position has just as many ideological blinders on as the one you think you are making arguments against.
The USSR collapsed because it failed to provide material prosperity. China, by any metric you could measure, is wildly succeeding at providing that material prosperity. That is what the party is focused on, because that's what's going to keep them in power.
Idk how you can include any of those but North Korea in the list (North Korea only exists because China secures it). Russia at least, is a good example of the opposite: give people chance to earn and invest money and enrich themselves and they will give no shit about even the most ridiculous things government does.
Soviet Union has collapsed while having whole lot more economic power and raw output of just about every industry, and was much more up to date technologically, but it deprived people of their basic instinct: to save and invest money and grow rich. Today's Russia allows and encourages that. Moreover, it even allows people say, to blatantly ignore taxes on all levels (i know people who make millions bucks per year in Russia and they don't know what tax number is, receiving and spending money through the banks in the open - and banks even help then when they need to make that money look legit abroad). As long as you don't try to oppose the great Pu or mess with politics overall, the regime has nothing against people enriching themselves - so the support base is rock solid and need for violence to maintain internal order is next to nonexistent.
Russia isn't democratic, but it is capitalist in the sense: you can own capital and government wants you to, and sees people who have capital as by default more well-behaved and loyal than those who don't. The sickest shit Putin may say on TV is shrugged by those people as "Pu just wants to make those peasants happy", and they may be even right.
> Soviet Union has collapsed while having whole lot more economic power and raw output of just about every industry, and was much more up to date technologically, but it deprived people of their basic instinct: to save and invest money and grow rich.
The Soviet Union pissed half of its economy away into its military, and the other half into its particular brand of waste, inefficiency, and corruption. It had a shortage of housing, basic consumer goods, and appliances - a shortage of material wealth, which became untenable by the time the fourth post-war decade rolled around, and everyone started wondering why the country has 12,000 nuclear warheads, but is still so goddamn poor.
If material wealth weren't the problem, or if Gorbachev didn't decide to stop imprisoning people for complaining about it, it would still be around today.
The world's three meals away from anarchy, if there were serious material shortages in the US today, nobody would give a crap about what monetary policy it follows, or whether or not you can save. King Bread is a ruler you swear fealty to, compared to him, King Dollar is something that comfortable philosophers build elaborate arguments for and temples to.
Those are all countries in which I'd hazard a free and open election, without a thumb on the scales and voted in by all citizens, would topple their governments.
Your description of Russia seems accurate, ~1995 to ~2010.
However, policies appear to be changing into tighter, more direct state control of oligarchs, in an effort to ensure civil stability.
Additionally, Putin is now 70... which is getting to the age that more laissez faire dictators turn increasingly autocratic in response to any external disturbances of their social control.
At some age and tiredness, it seems like the blunt approach trumps finessing a solution between multiple competing interests.
And... not to put too fine a point on it, but Putin did just survive a coup attempt, which wouldn't have launched if there weren't some support for it among the myriad power brokers in Russia.
I don't mean oligarchs. I mean everyday men and women. People don't want to be politically active because they know that Putin allows and wants them to acquire wealth (and even has no problem with them exporting that wealth abroad); and they also know that the masses don't want them to be allowed that, and if Putin is out, most probably masses will have it their way.
Ironically, today the idea of reintroducing capital controls was rejected, officially, "because it was obvious that people will quickly find ways around it anyway". Simply put, there is no need to further increase already terrible level of corruption by introducing another useless but corruption-inducing regulation.
It only shows us that current Chinese regime is a civilisational dead end.
Also, by that point, they didn't have the money. China was overpopulated and did not have marginal income to pay them, and the productivity was overall too low. No one in China had money, so force ruled.
> It only shows us that current Chinese regime is a civilisational dead end.
Creating an all-encompassing historical 'rule' like 'money always wins' and then discounting evidence of a blatant counter-example is not generally a method that ends in good outcomes.
See: all major failed political movements based on an ideology that refused to adapt to conditions that did not line up with its dogma.
The Soviet Communist Party also had millions of members, but we all know how that ended - hardly with a bang and a whimper.
Folks join not for ideology but for the social standing and future career prospects - you not going to be a senior bureaucrat or military officer if you ain't a member.
In the same way they did mortgages. The people who built the houses that were sold to people who couldnt afford them, were also standing around scratching their head.
Its a joke because there is an upper limit to what the world can offer for content. Only the finance robots who run these companies believe it doesnt matter.
After all this time, Netflix hasnt been able to get more than 200-250 million subscribers, even though Startups and CEOs love to bray about how the internet is full of billions of people, just waiting to hand over their cash. The truth is vast ocean of people dont have cash.
And now the market capture phase is complete. The people who can pay, have already been corralled into pens and are milked everyday. The finance class then turns their attention to milking the "subprime" crowd. Give them credit cards. Get the advertisers involved. Reduce the VFX, content creation, animation budgets, layoff those self important expensive engineers.
Such a system doesn't generate software quality beyond a point, cuz it doesn't need it. In a few years Netflix will look like Yahoo.
Tech and Content do not run the world. Finance does. Sooner or later into the ground. Cause the goal of milking cows hits an upper limit.