What you describe is a big part of it, but it’s only part. The other big thing that happened is the near-total loss of ad revenue. Facebook built really good microtargeting, so that it became more cost-effective to advertise on their product to reach a local audience than to advertise on local news outlets, and Craigslist did the same for classifieds.
Subscriptions are only a partial workaround for some news outlets; you can’t actually charge a subscription for most local news — not enough people can pay it to result in a viable publication.
In any case, this loss of revenue means that the typical local outlet can’t afford anything like the level of reporting they had 20 years ago.
I’m not even sure it’s the capitalist model that failed it. Whether capitalist communist or whatever, we have plenty of evidence is that this is what happens to Institutions in general.
An institute of some kind is created, let’s say the New York Times, for example. Over time, the Institution grows and excels at the goals it was originally created for (quality journalism, for the NYT). Eventually, all the people who originally created it die off and they are replaced by new people with no connection to the creation or ideals of the Institution. This happens several more times, each time the group of leaders becoming more and more distanced from the original goals of the institution and becoming more or less “enablers of the status quo.” When the institution no longer servers its initial purpose, it does not shut down, it simply moves into protecting itself and it’s purpose becomes extending it’s own existence for the sake of extending it’s own existence. The people who now work there view it as a job and if the place they work shuts down they won’t have a job but they’re so far away from the reasons it was created to begin with, they’re making all the wrong choices to try to save it because they’re just trying to save it instead of finding a new reason for it to exist and throw away the original framework that is no longer working.
This is the path of institutions, no matter the political or economic style being used. They start amazing, grow large and useful, then slowly become behemoths disconnected from their original goals and ideals and start existing simply for the sake of existing because nobody would know what to do without them, even though they’re currently failing their goals miserably.
Traditional news media has been this behemoth that exists simply for the sake of existing for a long, long time. They’ve been unwilling to adapt for decades now.
It’s the path of strongly hierarchical institutions. The hierarchy itself skews bullshitters and sociopaths into power over time, and it becomes self-justifying and drops the core goals as you point out.
Flatter hierarchy institutions seem to have some immunity to this if the central goals are sufficiently motivating. The Quakers manage a fairly enduring fidelity to their original principles, for instance, and I admire their organizational methods and commitment to good works, if not their mythology. At a much smaller scale, nonprofits and cooperatives I have been involved with also have more or leas success avoiding institutional rot based on that combination of clear goals and power sharing.
I’m interested/hesitant to see what becomes of Linux after Linus Torvalds retires/dies. I think the Linux Kernel Mailing List fits the kind of flat structure you’re speaking of, and I do wonder if it will retain that structure without Torvalds.
These flatter structureware more resistant to it yes, but it takes a lot of cohesive philosophy. Quakers have such a depth of philosophy behind their loose organization that you even have Non-theist Quakers who don’t believe in a Christian God but still believe in the power of the fundamental values of community. The Friends are some cool people for sure and are still going strong despite being a minority in the larger US Christian population.
Hm good point, and the techbro loligarchs will be gunning for control over areas like that, so it will be under pressure.
Kinda like the character assassination misinformation campaign that temporarily sidelined RMS from the FSF. My pet conspiracy theory is that that was motivated by people who wanted the FSF to move away from its hard-line “copyleft for the benefit of the end-users rights” stance and become more accepting of corporate exploitation of Free Software.
05 June 2006 (Dutch pedophiles form political party)
Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.
[Reference updated on 2018-04-25 because the old link was broken.]
I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
[Many years after posting this note, I had conversations with people who had been sexually abused as children and had suffered harmful effects. These conversations eventually convinced me that the practice is harmful and adults should not do it.]
He wrote this, on his own volition, without anyone forcing his hand, at the age of fifty-three years old. Fifty-three. It took him until he was in his sixties to be talked out of this position. This was posted on his public facing website. He chose to write this and show the world.
I’m sorry, no matter how great his contributions were, this was and is beyond the pale for the face of a public organization. It shouldn’t take you until you’re nearly sixty to figure out how that’s deeply wrong.
Honestly, I actually lump Stallman in with figures like Musk because they’re always making dumbfuck off the cuff remarks like this because they think they’re far more clever than they actually are.
I personally think he is the kind of person who hurts the organization and makes it difficult for the organization to connect with regular people, which is what it has to do if it actually wants to make headway in the world instead of being some fucking sweaty nerd club.
How was this a character assassination and misinformation campaign again? This is what he chose to write, on his own website, in his own words, unforced. It was more gross that it took over a decade for it to matter to anyone.
EDIT: I’m gonna quote myself with something I just wrote elsewhere, in response to https://www.opm.gov/fork
God damn it these fucking techbro loligarchs and their dipshit nerd humor.
Hurr hurr we’re making a fork of the US government code hurr durr.
What a bunch of juvenile fucking delinquents.
And that’s exactly how I feel about all these recursive name joke bullshit that RMS always did. “Gnu’s Not Unix” hurr hurr hurr get fucked, that stupid nerd shit humor is literally fucking up our government right now. I never cared for it, it’s dumb elitist bullshit that a lot of people who aren’t mathy just don’t get. That alienates people, it doesn’t bring them in.
The point is, the guy is egalitarian to a fault: he wrote the stuff you quoted not because he was trying to defend predatory adults, but because he was skeptical about disregarding the decision-making agency of children.
If there’s a problem with RMS, it’s that he’s too autistic to understand that some topics are too radioactive to write about, and that he makes very nuanced arguments that are vulnerable to misrepresentation by people with agendas.
The Linux Kernel is actually hierarchical by design. Anyone can submit a patch, but it then has to go up the maintainer chain to Linus’ final approval before landing mainline, but of course Linus doesn’t review everything himself and implicitly trusts his maintainers.
So part of the Rust drama a few months ago was accusations that despite the stated goal of rustifying some subsystems, the existing hierarchy is sometimes acting in bad faith and unwilling to learn the basics of Rust to talk ABI or generally accommodate the reasonable needs of Rust devs. Asahi Lina had an impressive writeup of her Rust contributions to the Apple Silicon GPU driver and the frequent, demotivating difficulties she had with maintainers refusing to learn anything that isn’t C or to acknowledge errors like race conditions in their C code. Some insanely talented people are being kept at arm’s length by the kernel community over petty turf wars that look very much like a symptom of institutional rot. Which isn’t very surprising to me having met some unrelated but very highly opinionated (and sometimes very confidently incorrect) greybeards of similar ilk.
I don’t have a horse in that race or a solution to the kernel issues, but it’s interesting to watch how at scale even kernel OSS devs fall into the same trappings as any institution with a hierarchy. We’re all just human, and even when working for an organization with the most noble of goals we must keep an eye out for hierarchies and institutions and rules and processes.
I think this is a pretty good perspective (thank you political author Snot Flickerman, god I love the internet)
I’ve heard very similar explanations for why communes falls apart You start with a group of adults who want to live communally, they get that rolling and sometimes it works out really well. But they almost never survive the second generation because too many of the commune kids don’t really care about the group and just want to get away and build their own lives.
If anything, practices like the Amish sending their kids out into the world and letting them choose to return to the life probably work out a lot better to disperse teenage rebellion and reestablish the values and ideals of the community.
If the leadership (and there’s always leadership, even if informally) is open, then the influx of new ideas can also help prevent stagnation, but for exactly the reasons outlined above (institutional capture, stagnant high-rankers more concerned with status quo and the security of their positions) leadership tends to close itself off.
I do think the capitalist mode makes this worse though. In theory, communal projects just fall apart when they fail to adapt, since they lose their purpose. Capitalist organizations can often keep going in zombie mode, because the actual function of ALL capitalist organizations is to make money. Anything else is literally idealism layered on top, the material reality is that capitalist organizations exist to make money. And when the ideals fall away, that still remains and becomes the hungry driver of all future decisions.
I’m reminded of a thing I complain about all the time: the festival cycle. Say you learn about a new festival, or outdoor concert, or similar such thing. The first year will typically be chaotic, a little disorganized, but the people tend to be enthusiastic. They want to be here, they want to have fun, but they also are motivated early-adopters and friends of the organizers, so they want to help make it a good festival.
The 2nd through 5th-ish years of the annual festival are the prime years. Success in the first (and subsequent) years attracts better talent, more talent, and more people. The festival is lively, fun, and often carries some idealism as well. Like, “this festival celebrate music in our community” or “all proceeds of the fair go to feeding the homeless!”
By the 6th year though, if it has continued to be successful, this is about the time when the amount of “party people” is severly out-weighing the commited festival goers. These are the people that dont make costumes, dont camp out, dont really engage with the festival beyond pure trasactionalism: I give you money, and you give me fun.
There’s now too much money, profit, in the system and usually a big national company makes a buy-out offer now, or the festival is simply big enough that managing it necessitates building a company and the finance people just worm their way in. Ticket prices go up, tickets get partitioned into VIP tiers, local acts get replace with big corporate names, ads and merchandising begin to dominate your eye lines everywhere in the festival.
Eventually, it either outgrows its birthplace and moves somewhere bigger, or becomes so large and mismanaged that it becomes too unprofitable to run anymore and gets shut down. A few people go “man, remember how cool Blahfest was? What if we got some friends together and organized a new BlergFest?!” and the cycle begins again.
thank you political author Snot Flickerman, god I love the internet
Flattering, but I want to make clear I’m just regurgitating half-understood ideas from much smarter and clever people than me. So not smart I can’t even dig up the proper sources because I’m an idiot. Which is why I’m merely a Snot Flickerman.
This is a related but distinct phenomenon. What you’re missing is that while change from turnover is inevitable, it doesn’t have to be a bad change. However private ownership (or other types of top down organizational methods) and profit seeking is what drives this change in a specifically negative direction.
If the right incentive structure was in place, it could just as easily be that turnover leads to evolution in a positive direction. But our current corporate structures mean the political dominance by leadership and delivering shareholder value trump all other considerations, including ethics.
These problems are not unique to legacy outlets like NYT. New media outlets are also mostly failing in their duties to do proper journalism and provide a public service. The exact manifestation differs slightly because their medium tends to differ slightly. But they still have the same toxic incentives.
That is the cycle of enshittification: give things away free at first, find ways to get indirect revenue from that by selling your users once the network effects kick in, and then in the end, raid the whole company for the primary shareholders.
It’s a new economic model peculiar to late stage capitalism, and it’s like an engine that drives loligarchy. Chucklefuck rich white boys who don’t realize a little learning is the most dangerous thing of all.
In the mid-2000’s traditional advertising was still doing gangbusters. They absolutely had options to invest in other revenue streams, and they chose not to for over a decade. They could have been invested in this stuff by the mid-90’s but they didn’t want to. We can stop making excuses for why they lost all that revenue when it’s their own shitty decisions and unwillingness to change with the times.
Facebook launched their first ad offerings in 2004. This was a choice by traditional media to let new media eat their lunch. We can stop making excuses for their bad business decisions. The iPhone wouldn’t exist for three more years.
Being unwilling to change your business model for twenty years is a huge part of it yeah.
Yep, you’ll keep losing fucking money if you’re too dumb to think of a new way to make money.
What you described is the same as I described, with a lot of handwaving away of the endless shitty decisions of management at these industry groups and an almost outright refusal to pursue new revenue streams until it was too late.
They could have been the first to market with things like that, but they never invested in them, opting to “nail a TV to the wall” than hire engineers to compete on the internet.
What was stopping these groups from developing better ad targeting? They didn’t want to have to, they thought they could just use the money and muscle of their position to keep it.
They literally at one point had the money to poach engineers from Facebook, Google, Apple, et. al. but it was never something they cared to invest in until they no longer had money to be able to invest in it.
When my companies CEO flew in to our town on his private jet in 2004 to tell us nobody was getting raises until the industry was doing better, I knew traditional media was cooked. The people who run the show were too fucking stupid, slow, and self-interested to look ahead.
What you describe is a big part of it, but it’s only part. The other big thing that happened is the near-total loss of ad revenue. Facebook built really good microtargeting, so that it became more cost-effective to advertise on their product to reach a local audience than to advertise on local news outlets, and Craigslist did the same for classifieds.
The result looks like this for most outlets:
Subscriptions are only a partial workaround for some news outlets; you can’t actually charge a subscription for most local news — not enough people can pay it to result in a viable publication.
In any case, this loss of revenue means that the typical local outlet can’t afford anything like the level of reporting they had 20 years ago.
The capitalist model is failing the journalism industry. Is there a way to build a mutual aid network for good journalism?
I’m not even sure it’s the capitalist model that failed it. Whether capitalist communist or whatever, we have plenty of evidence is that this is what happens to Institutions in general.
An institute of some kind is created, let’s say the New York Times, for example. Over time, the Institution grows and excels at the goals it was originally created for (quality journalism, for the NYT). Eventually, all the people who originally created it die off and they are replaced by new people with no connection to the creation or ideals of the Institution. This happens several more times, each time the group of leaders becoming more and more distanced from the original goals of the institution and becoming more or less “enablers of the status quo.” When the institution no longer servers its initial purpose, it does not shut down, it simply moves into protecting itself and it’s purpose becomes extending it’s own existence for the sake of extending it’s own existence. The people who now work there view it as a job and if the place they work shuts down they won’t have a job but they’re so far away from the reasons it was created to begin with, they’re making all the wrong choices to try to save it because they’re just trying to save it instead of finding a new reason for it to exist and throw away the original framework that is no longer working.
This is the path of institutions, no matter the political or economic style being used. They start amazing, grow large and useful, then slowly become behemoths disconnected from their original goals and ideals and start existing simply for the sake of existing because nobody would know what to do without them, even though they’re currently failing their goals miserably.
Traditional news media has been this behemoth that exists simply for the sake of existing for a long, long time. They’ve been unwilling to adapt for decades now.
It’s the path of strongly hierarchical institutions. The hierarchy itself skews bullshitters and sociopaths into power over time, and it becomes self-justifying and drops the core goals as you point out.
Flatter hierarchy institutions seem to have some immunity to this if the central goals are sufficiently motivating. The Quakers manage a fairly enduring fidelity to their original principles, for instance, and I admire their organizational methods and commitment to good works, if not their mythology. At a much smaller scale, nonprofits and cooperatives I have been involved with also have more or leas success avoiding institutional rot based on that combination of clear goals and power sharing.
I’m interested/hesitant to see what becomes of Linux after Linus Torvalds retires/dies. I think the Linux Kernel Mailing List fits the kind of flat structure you’re speaking of, and I do wonder if it will retain that structure without Torvalds.
These flatter structureware more resistant to it yes, but it takes a lot of cohesive philosophy. Quakers have such a depth of philosophy behind their loose organization that you even have Non-theist Quakers who don’t believe in a Christian God but still believe in the power of the fundamental values of community. The Friends are some cool people for sure and are still going strong despite being a minority in the larger US Christian population.
Hm good point, and the techbro loligarchs will be gunning for control over areas like that, so it will be under pressure.
Not a popcorn show though. More like fingernail lunch.
Kinda like the character assassination misinformation campaign that temporarily sidelined RMS from the FSF. My pet conspiracy theory is that that was motivated by people who wanted the FSF to move away from its hard-line “copyleft for the benefit of the end-users rights” stance and become more accepting of corporate exploitation of Free Software.
https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05 June 2006 (Dutch paedophiles form political party)
He wrote this, on his own volition, without anyone forcing his hand, at the age of fifty-three years old. Fifty-three. It took him until he was in his sixties to be talked out of this position. This was posted on his public facing website. He chose to write this and show the world.
I’m sorry, no matter how great his contributions were, this was and is beyond the pale for the face of a public organization. It shouldn’t take you until you’re nearly sixty to figure out how that’s deeply wrong.
Honestly, I actually lump Stallman in with figures like Musk because they’re always making dumbfuck off the cuff remarks like this because they think they’re far more clever than they actually are.
I personally think he is the kind of person who hurts the organization and makes it difficult for the organization to connect with regular people, which is what it has to do if it actually wants to make headway in the world instead of being some fucking sweaty nerd club.
How was this a character assassination and misinformation campaign again? This is what he chose to write, on his own website, in his own words, unforced. It was more gross that it took over a decade for it to matter to anyone.
EDIT: I’m gonna quote myself with something I just wrote elsewhere, in response to https://www.opm.gov/fork
And that’s exactly how I feel about all these recursive name joke bullshit that RMS always did. “Gnu’s Not Unix” hurr hurr hurr get fucked, that stupid nerd shit humor is literally fucking up our government right now. I never cared for it, it’s dumb elitist bullshit that a lot of people who aren’t mathy just don’t get. That alienates people, it doesn’t bring them in.
RMS is also someone who, on his own volition, came up with his own set of gender-neutral pronouns over a decade ago, before it was cool.
The point is, the guy is egalitarian to a fault: he wrote the stuff you quoted not because he was trying to defend predatory adults, but because he was skeptical about disregarding the decision-making agency of children.
If there’s a problem with RMS, it’s that he’s too autistic to understand that some topics are too radioactive to write about, and that he makes very nuanced arguments that are vulnerable to misrepresentation by people with agendas.
The Linux Kernel is actually hierarchical by design. Anyone can submit a patch, but it then has to go up the maintainer chain to Linus’ final approval before landing mainline, but of course Linus doesn’t review everything himself and implicitly trusts his maintainers.
So part of the Rust drama a few months ago was accusations that despite the stated goal of rustifying some subsystems, the existing hierarchy is sometimes acting in bad faith and unwilling to learn the basics of Rust to talk ABI or generally accommodate the reasonable needs of Rust devs. Asahi Lina had an impressive writeup of her Rust contributions to the Apple Silicon GPU driver and the frequent, demotivating difficulties she had with maintainers refusing to learn anything that isn’t C or to acknowledge errors like race conditions in their C code. Some insanely talented people are being kept at arm’s length by the kernel community over petty turf wars that look very much like a symptom of institutional rot. Which isn’t very surprising to me having met some unrelated but very highly opinionated (and sometimes very confidently incorrect) greybeards of similar ilk.
I don’t have a horse in that race or a solution to the kernel issues, but it’s interesting to watch how at scale even kernel OSS devs fall into the same trappings as any institution with a hierarchy. We’re all just human, and even when working for an organization with the most noble of goals we must keep an eye out for hierarchies and institutions and rules and processes.
I think this is a pretty good perspective (thank you political author Snot Flickerman, god I love the internet)
I’ve heard very similar explanations for why communes falls apart You start with a group of adults who want to live communally, they get that rolling and sometimes it works out really well. But they almost never survive the second generation because too many of the commune kids don’t really care about the group and just want to get away and build their own lives.
If anything, practices like the Amish sending their kids out into the world and letting them choose to return to the life probably work out a lot better to disperse teenage rebellion and reestablish the values and ideals of the community.
If the leadership (and there’s always leadership, even if informally) is open, then the influx of new ideas can also help prevent stagnation, but for exactly the reasons outlined above (institutional capture, stagnant high-rankers more concerned with status quo and the security of their positions) leadership tends to close itself off.
I do think the capitalist mode makes this worse though. In theory, communal projects just fall apart when they fail to adapt, since they lose their purpose. Capitalist organizations can often keep going in zombie mode, because the actual function of ALL capitalist organizations is to make money. Anything else is literally idealism layered on top, the material reality is that capitalist organizations exist to make money. And when the ideals fall away, that still remains and becomes the hungry driver of all future decisions.
I’m reminded of a thing I complain about all the time: the festival cycle. Say you learn about a new festival, or outdoor concert, or similar such thing. The first year will typically be chaotic, a little disorganized, but the people tend to be enthusiastic. They want to be here, they want to have fun, but they also are motivated early-adopters and friends of the organizers, so they want to help make it a good festival.
The 2nd through 5th-ish years of the annual festival are the prime years. Success in the first (and subsequent) years attracts better talent, more talent, and more people. The festival is lively, fun, and often carries some idealism as well. Like, “this festival celebrate music in our community” or “all proceeds of the fair go to feeding the homeless!”
By the 6th year though, if it has continued to be successful, this is about the time when the amount of “party people” is severly out-weighing the commited festival goers. These are the people that dont make costumes, dont camp out, dont really engage with the festival beyond pure trasactionalism: I give you money, and you give me fun.
There’s now too much money, profit, in the system and usually a big national company makes a buy-out offer now, or the festival is simply big enough that managing it necessitates building a company and the finance people just worm their way in. Ticket prices go up, tickets get partitioned into VIP tiers, local acts get replace with big corporate names, ads and merchandising begin to dominate your eye lines everywhere in the festival.
Eventually, it either outgrows its birthplace and moves somewhere bigger, or becomes so large and mismanaged that it becomes too unprofitable to run anymore and gets shut down. A few people go “man, remember how cool Blahfest was? What if we got some friends together and organized a new BlergFest?!” and the cycle begins again.
Flattering, but I want to make clear I’m just regurgitating half-understood ideas from much smarter and clever people than me. So not smart I can’t even dig up the proper sources because I’m an idiot. Which is why I’m merely a Snot Flickerman.
Also the notes on festivals are spot on.
This is a related but distinct phenomenon. What you’re missing is that while change from turnover is inevitable, it doesn’t have to be a bad change. However private ownership (or other types of top down organizational methods) and profit seeking is what drives this change in a specifically negative direction.
If the right incentive structure was in place, it could just as easily be that turnover leads to evolution in a positive direction. But our current corporate structures mean the political dominance by leadership and delivering shareholder value trump all other considerations, including ethics.
These problems are not unique to legacy outlets like NYT. New media outlets are also mostly failing in their duties to do proper journalism and provide a public service. The exact manifestation differs slightly because their medium tends to differ slightly. But they still have the same toxic incentives.
What caused the failure was everyone thinking everything should be free
That is the cycle of enshittification: give things away free at first, find ways to get indirect revenue from that by selling your users once the network effects kick in, and then in the end, raid the whole company for the primary shareholders.
It’s a new economic model peculiar to late stage capitalism, and it’s like an engine that drives loligarchy. Chucklefuck rich white boys who don’t realize a little learning is the most dangerous thing of all.
EDIT:https://whattheythink.com/news/22401-2004-marks-strongest-close-magazine-advertising-since/
In the mid-2000’s traditional advertising was still doing gangbusters. They absolutely had options to invest in other revenue streams, and they chose not to for over a decade. They could have been invested in this stuff by the mid-90’s but they didn’t want to. We can stop making excuses for why they lost all that revenue when it’s their own shitty decisions and unwillingness to change with the times.
Facebook launched their first ad offerings in 2004. This was a choice by traditional media to let new media eat their lunch. We can stop making excuses for their bad business decisions. The iPhone wouldn’t exist for three more years.
Being unwilling to change your business model for twenty years is a huge part of it yeah.
Yep, you’ll keep losing fucking money if you’re too dumb to think of a new way to make money.
What you described is the same as I described, with a lot of handwaving away of the endless shitty decisions of management at these industry groups and an almost outright refusal to pursue new revenue streams until it was too late.
They could have been the first to market with things like that, but they never invested in them, opting to “nail a TV to the wall” than hire engineers to compete on the internet.
What was stopping these groups from developing better ad targeting? They didn’t want to have to, they thought they could just use the money and muscle of their position to keep it.
They literally at one point had the money to poach engineers from Facebook, Google, Apple, et. al. but it was never something they cared to invest in until they no longer had money to be able to invest in it.
When my companies CEO flew in to our town on his private jet in 2004 to tell us nobody was getting raises until the industry was doing better, I knew traditional media was cooked. The people who run the show were too fucking stupid, slow, and self-interested to look ahead.
They literally had 25 years to figure this out.