07.19.13
‘Real America” does mean (n.) best
The only read “Real America” needs
PARIAH: “Get your elitist nose bloodied today!”
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Tech Tip for Today
Don’t watch Net TV on original content server websites of mega-corporations. They drip with what would have been considered malicious programming ten years ago.
I have been mildly interested in Under the Dome, the CBS serialization of the King science-fiction novel. If you watch it on CBS’s website it lays an unnecessary burden on you.
It’s far easier and more pleasant to watch it off a site that provides pirated streams, like Couch Tuner.
And this is because American mega-business entertainment and news websites have largely gone over to using malicious programming web design to wring maximum value from online viewers. They all use scripting to take over your machine, instituting endless background downloading and churn to whatever stream you are intent on viewing or listening to. The programming design of the page is not to benefit the user in any way. It is to squeeze maximum big data and value from the target.
Let’s take Rolling Stone magazine’s website as another example.
If you read Matt Taibbi’s space regularly you’ll have noticed that the RS designers have put in a click trap as well as an annoying overlay. When you click on a Taibbi post the first time it will load a Facebook sign-on so that it can reach into your profile on the social network. And this is not because they like you and are trying to make an easy, pleasant experience of the reading.
RS wants your profile data for use in its advertising department. It wants the ability to sneakily add likes you may not be interested in giving to its own presence. And it wants your material for whatever reciprocal deal it has going with the ZuckerBorg. This just for the privilege of reading a damn blog posting already festooned with digital advertising.
Most of this is plainly hostile. American web users accept this because it is normalized. They have been conditioned to take a daily dispensation of digital guff as good. The web was far from always being like this.
You can deal with this level of corporate animosity, for television anyway, by using the pirate aggregator I linked to at the beginning of the piece. If you do so and you’re savvy enough about your machine, you’ll immediately see the processing burden is far less, even with pop-ups from the Internet’s bottom-feeders.
There is no reason for streamed network television or video to take over your device.
Paradoxically, pirate sites which established the reputation for giving you malicious gifts you didn’t want, are now a more pleasant place to do on-line viewing of mainstream corporate product.
They also dispense with the commercial breaks.
I don’t have a problem with commercials but in today’s world their elimination becomes an added small pleasure, too. Because in erasing them more layers of the automation of reflexive corporate grasping that permeates every aspect of the American experience are peeled away.
As mega-corporate America becomes more malicious on the web, enabled by Silicon Valley programming for the aggregation of avarice, aka the sharing economy [1], it becomes counter-productive. It gives justice to recommending and encouraging piracy, outright stealing of content.
When you cynically view your web-delivered entertainment as just another vehicle for extracting data from consumers, you’ve crossed a threshold to a point where striking back with efforts to deprive you of that content, if even only in a minimal way, are just.
American corporations work under the premise that it’s proper and fair for them to use programming to surreptitiously get into your on-line world, to reach into your pocket. They employ the equivalent of malicious programming to do it. Twenty years ago they would have been called professional programmers of booby-traps, trojan horses, and viruses. They share the same sets of skills. They are criminals passed off as cutting edge programmers.
1. The sharing economy: American tech industry euphemism for the creation of an economy in which the top 1 percent gets all the share.
07.17.13
Making work not pay: Digital progress to disempower
Yesterday, an article from TIME magazine on the obvious: Digital technology has destroyed making a living on recorded music unless you’re at the very top of the winner-take-all society. The euphemism the gurus of tomorrow have developed for it is the sharing economy, or an economy in which only the 1 percent, or a very few, own all the share. More recently, the blog has discussed it here and here.
It’s not news that the sharing economy has demolished the music business. However, what you don’t often see are the actual statistics on how little even well-known names get for their work.
The fast-growing music-streaming service Spotify received a very public put-down on Sunday when singer Thom Yorke [of RadioHead] and producer Nigel Godrich, members of the band Atoms for Peace, announced via Twitter that their music would be pulled from the platform …
On Twitter, Godrich wrote that while streaming services can help established artists generate money from their past work, new artists are being stifled because of low payouts. “New artists get paid f–k all with this model. It’s an equation that just doesn’t work,??? he wrote.
The magazine added that independent music acts make about half a penny/song per stream.
Let’s do some obvious arithmetic: 1,000,000 x .005 = $5,000.
One million is major national hit numbers. Over the course of a year, a 5000 dollar pay-out is a pittance. For 100,000 plays, it’s a virtually not-worth-doing 500 bucks. Smaller numbers, and like Google’s profit sharing model for AdSense impressions, the artist can probably wait for 10 years of play for the threshold required to mandate cutting a check.
However, the operating environment in the winner-take-all digital economy is that the owners of capital make all the swag from the tools of digital distribution. From TIME: “The three major record labels actually own a minority stake in Spotify, which means they will be earning profits from the company’s overall future success whether or not it benefits individual artists.”
“The alternative before streaming was rampant piracy. A fear of returning to the days of Napster — along with a complacency on the part of record labels who can win with Spotify without necessarily having their artists win too …”
Paradoxically, this piece on one of the guru billionaires behind the digital awakening, Sean Parker, recently pilloried for an excessive wedding in Big Sur:
Napster founder, former Facebook president and Spotify billionaire Sean Parker has been forced to pay a $2.5 million (£1.6 million) fine after his extravagant star-studded wedding in California took place in a protected coastal area.
The 33-year-old, who was portrayed by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, married singer-song writer Alexandra Lenas in a $10 million ceremony on Saturday in Big Sur.
Officials were notified that he had reportedly built a small village – including a gated cottage, fake ruins, bridges, ponds, waterfalls and a huge dancefloor – without permission in a closed campground owned by Ventana Inn & Spa …
From Napster, and the bad old days of music piracy, to Spotify, the new bad days of shrinking the pie and taking what little is left off the peons, like grains of sand. He has all the bases covered.
The magic of the corporate technological revolution is that it does not result in progress. The software applications merely make the collection of monopoly rents on content production globally efficient. Simply by holding the distribution networks and applications, remuneration can be reduced to record low levels while using the group to keep individual corporate entity profit high. With the global reach of the world-spanning network, you can do that with every bit of intellectual or creative content created that is copied digitally.
This is the economic model and technology which will eventually get to hanging everyone from the lamp post for the benefit of the few.
We can cheer for the eventual destruction of Spotify as it serves no real purpose in the betterment of the artistic jungle. Maybe it will even happen. It would be only a small victory in a losing war. But the revenge aspect, the idea that one digital bilking operation/Ponzi scheme failed can yield minor satisfaction.
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07.16.13
Shit WhiteManistan’s Most Famous Ogre sez…
The rest of the country is now sort of hipping to the fact that newspaper reporters, tv men and music journalists calling Ted Nugent just a good speaker with colorful opinions, for years, has had a regrettable result.
This:
But George Zimmerman and his entire family, innocent of any wrongdoing, have lost everything and will be in debt for a long, long time for having to fight the trumped-up charges that he “profiled??? and/or set out to murder the poor, helpless, dope-smoking, dope-peddling, gangsta wannabe, Skittles hoodie boy.
No link, from Nugent’s column at WorldNetDaily, the second in two days on the same matter, only with the hate speech turned up louder.
It is hard to imagine a copy editor who is a decent human being not walking off the job upon being assigned a column containing that. Certainly, of all the copy editors and editors I’ve worked for or known, none would have stomached it or bought any arguments that it had worth as controversial free speech.
It’s just pure cruelty.
The mainstream media made Ted Nugent a more successful character. He’s as much a creature of CNN and network news as he is of fringe extreme right wing websites. Music journalists who have to deal with him every weekend on his summer tour of dumps hardly touch him other than to print whatever he says.
A few days ago, at the Phoenix New Times, the terrible alternative news weekly company that bought the Village Voice and its properties years ago:
Nugent: Clearly Democrats have a solid lock on racism by scamming dishonest policies that continue the slavery of dependency that has hurt the black community more than any other … Historically it was the Democrat Party that fought against civil rights on all fronts, even infesting the evil subhuman KKK. The truth is very ugly and hurts, doesn’t it?
Ted Nugent is this summer’s public standard-bearer for malice delivered fresh from WhiteManistan every week.
There’s a cost for mainstreaming hate speech as bread-and-circuses entertainment and the final line on the bill for it isn’t in sight.
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Two Facebook Tech Tips for Today
Tech Tip 1. Start unliking stuff in your movies, music and tv tracks. Facebook’s Open Graph search in league with corporate America and random busybodies will only use it against you. No good will come of it. Seriously, do have any real ‘friends’ who like you for your canonical list of movies and books? Your corporate ‘likes’ are of no value to you. Why should anyone else get value from them? You think Facebook and corporate America will get friendly with you some day and just dispense a benefit in return, one you never saw coming? While you’re unliking stuff, use your smartphone and call your doctor to say you won’t be needing any more refills on the prescription for stupid pills.
Tech Tip 2. Block someone. FB is not a democracy of free speech. Mark Zuckerberg would secretly laugh at you for thinking so. America is not about free speech, it’s about corporate fascism. And neither is your “timeline” about free speech. It’s your virtual backyard micro app, one you have slight control over. So when a stranger you’d never share a drink with starts getting on your nerves in a “share” comment line and doesn’t take a hint, block. Block with vigor, block with elan. It makes you feel good, too. Refresh the page and watch their silly little face or avatar replaced by a blank silhouette. Now they can’t see you! It will take a moment for them to grasp what has happened, just as they were sharpening another rudeness. It will spoil their fun for a bit and you’ll have enjoyed stepping on someone. Trust me. I’m a professional.
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Ricin Mama to plead not guilty
By reason of insanity or something.
A Texas woman has been charged with federal violations for allegedly sending ricin-laced letters to the president.
Shannon Guess Richardson, a 35-year-old New Boston, Texas, resident, was named in a three-count indictment by a federal grand jury in the Tyler Division of the Eastern District of Texas …
Richardson contacted federal investigators claiming she had found a suspicious substance in the refrigerator and ricin-related internet searches on the couple’s computer, the article says. Investigators say they found evidence that she sent the letters herself.
Richardson’s lawyer, Tonda Curry, told the Associated Press that her client will plead not guilty and that the government must show that the woman had “the requisite mental state??? to prove her actions were a crime.
I’ve not commented on the US government’s spying on the mail program, inadvertantly revealed in one of the indictments hadn’t down in the ricin cluster.
Two reasons: There was no need of it in either the Dutscke or Richardson cases. Dutschke allegedly wanted the FBI to come to Tupelo, MI. And Richardson summoned the agency, allegedly putting a return address on the letters that placed them near her home.
Reason number two: Bruce Ivins, the anthrax mailer, would not have been caught by the program although it was put in place because of him. Ivins drove from Frederick, MD, to a mailbox drop in Princeton, NJ., to send anthrax.
So what is the net effect of the massive spying effort? Virtually nil.
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Rent-seeking and inequality
Economics Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz neatly explains corporate American rent-seeking behavior in a New York Times piece examining the Supreme Court’s ruling that an American company cannot patent existing human genes.
It involved a company called Myriad and patents on two genes thought to be at the root of breast cancer. With the establishment of its patents, the company established a monopoly on potential early breast cancer diagnosis, pricing a very basic need in such a way that only the privileged could afford it.
Stiglitz defines and explains:
[Some] of the most iniquitous aspects of inequality creation within our economic system are a result of “rent-seeking???: profits, and inequality, generated by manipulating social or political conditions to get a larger share of the economic pie, rather than increasing the size of that pie. And the most iniquitous aspect of this wealth appropriation arises when the wealth that goes to the top comes at the expense of the bottom. Myriad’s efforts satisfied both these conditions: the profits the company gained from charging for its test added nothing to the size and dynamism of the economy, and simultaneously decreased the welfare of those who could not afford it …
Myriad’s effort to patent human DNA was one of the worst manifestations of the inequality in access to health, which in turn is one of the worst manifestations of the country’s economic inequality. That the court decision has upheld our cherished rights and values is a cause for a sigh of relief. But it is only one victory in the bigger struggle for a more egalitarian society and economy.
This fits nicely with a larger discussion I’ve been attempting here over the past months.
Yesterday, I briefly touched upon how the tools of technology (in a specific case involving YouTube, those made by Google) allow the establishment of rent-seeking behavior by mega-corporations as massive owners of intellectual property.
Google/YouTube’s arrangements do not increase the size of the economic pie available to all. But by enabling corporations to take entire control of content created by others that may use only a part of their intellectual property in the artistic endeavor, simply by flicking a software switch to scan for IP property signatures within uploaded files, it has enabled easy rent-seeking on the backs of others.
Individuals at the user level on Google properties have no access to such power. And, in fact, find that for practical matters their content is almost impossible to monetize from their end.
On the other hand, corporate tech software has enabled the global control of the aggregate pie so that it can be squeezed of whatever is available. Yes, Google is now evil.
Rent-seeking — from the archives.
Systemic rent-seeking strikes at the very heart of democratic institutions in 2013 America. And that is because, fundamentally, it is about disenfranchising the many for the monetary benefit of those with all the capital.
Because it is quickly producing a less stable society, and in the case discussed by Joseph Stiglitz shows an easily provable damaging effect on women’s health, it can kill people. In the long run, it is an obvious security threat.
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07.15.13
Shit the ministers of WhiteManistan say…
The man the WaPost devoted a Sunday magazine feature to, delivering the pure milk of human kindness for which he is known and revered:
“And so it was for a few weeks until the race-baiting industry saw an opportunity to further the racist careers of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the Black Panthers. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, et al, who then swept down on the Florida community refusing to admit that the 17-year-old dope smoking, racist gangsta wannabe Trayvon Martin was at all responsible for his bad decisions and standard modus operendi [sic] of always taking the violent route … [No] one can possibly dispute the recent surge in black racism increasing throughout Barack Obama’s presidency … The only racism on that night was perpetrated by Trayvon Martin.”
No link.
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