07.15.13
Winner Take All Virtual Economy
More accurately, the owners of capital are the only ones capable of leveraging benefits from the new technological order. Jaron Lanier has apparently written a book on it, as have others. But most don’t have to read a book to have it explained because they’ve experienced it first hand.
Take, for example, YouTube, the use of visual and audio content, and digital rights tracking.
YouTube/Google runs a scanner that the big mega-corporations contribute content signature IDs to. (They also use personal reporting, aka the “fink button.”) When one hits a match, your video is flagged. At that point a number of things can happen.
It can be simply tracked and later monetized with overlay advertising.
Or the holder may ask it to be flagged and removed, at which point the user gets a penalty stroke.
In practice, the monetization part allows the holders of capital, or the owners of copyright, to extend ownership to creative and novel pieces which use only a portion of their content for purposes of entertainment, enlightenment or fun socio-cultural art.
So if you have recorded a song and made a little video for it, something a minute and a half to two minutes long, which partially cuts from a famous movie as a bit of humorous tribute, you can have it taken off you by the faceless super-corporation that owns one piece of it.
The average person, little people, have no way to monetize their creative work in cyberspace in this manner. They simply don’t.
And this opens up new streams of revenue, streams which require no work except content matching, for those who are already among the 1 percent.
That is the power of the Google digital ecology. It distributes the risk of digital creation to all the grains of sand in the world making content. And reserves the monetization of all of it to itself or business partners.
It’s no model for a viable future unless by such a future one means a handful or super-corporations and business entities that get almost everything from the virtual economy while everyone else sees nothing.
The reason for that is simple. The average person doesn’t have the capital to make a difference, except through blind luck. The numbers, in terms of raw popularity and ranking in search, are just never there. However, by controlling the entire pool of such things through the digital tools of universal aggregation, you can extract worth from everyone else without returning a thing. Except maybe a threat in a digital notice.
Search DD and “Rumble” to see an illustration. Note overlay.
Fair dinkum or not? You tell me.
Rigging counts and the winner-take-all virtual economy — from the archives.