In the new consumer economy, you get consumed

September 29, 2024 2:02 AM

This is precisely the situation in the digital culture right now. Google’s success in leeching off newspapers puts newspapers out of business. Musicians earn less and less, even as Spotify makes more and more. Hollywood is collapsing because it can’t compete with free video made by content providers. It’s no coincidence that these parasite platforms are the same companies investing heavily in AI. They must do this because even they understand that they are killing their hosts. from Are We Now Living in a Parasite Culture? by Ted Gioia
posted by chavenet (34 comments total)

the fish rots from the head down
posted by Borborygmus at 2:53 AM on September 29 [4 favorites]

"We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now all we do is put our hand in the next guy's pocket."

Frank Sobatka, 'The Wire'
posted by spoobnooble 3D: the spoobening at 3:16 AM on September 29 [39 favorites]

What is the difference between Gioia’s line of argument and the following argument?

Metafilter is filled with the product of content creators, but mysteriously the content creators never receive payment at all! In fact, the site revenue only goes to the site’s owners and workers. This is improper and parasitic: the exploitation should end! Metafilter content creators deserve payment for their posts!

Now, to be clear, I regard the bolded argument above as very weak, largely because I think MF provides value in aggregation/curation, reducing transaction costs, etc. But to the extent you think (for example) Facebook is parasitic along the lines of Gioia’s argument, it’s worth thinking about whether Gioia’s view is vulnerable to the same objections that you might have to the bolded passage above.
posted by PaulVario at 5:34 AM on September 29 [8 favorites]

That's only part of his argument.

A major part of his argument is that, for example, TikTok and Spotify and Facebook are reaping enormous profits that are shared sparingly, if at all, with creators. MetaFilter, unless I missed something very important, is not making an enormous profit. MetaFilter does not feature advertising, and it doesn't require users to pay a subscription fee; there is no obvious way for it to generate a profit. In other words, there is no money to share with the users. Indeed, one wonders how there is money to pay the staffers.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:42 AM on September 29 [32 favorites]

also, mefi isn't filled with content. It's filled with links to other content, and points people to the original creator.

ai is used as a tool to supplant creators.
posted by sagc at 5:55 AM on September 29 [24 favorites]

What about YouTube? Unboxing videos? How about "reaction" videos? 10 minutes of someone making faces to a song or movie scene they've never seen or heard before (wink wink).
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:06 AM on September 29 [3 favorites]

With respect to generative AI, the possible copyright infringements committed by the trainers of the current models is not the interesting long-term ethical question.

Consider a hypothetical AI explicitly trained only on things on the public domain. It may not be possible to create a "good" AI with this dataset restriction today, but it certainly will be eventually. Would it be ethical to replace human labor with the output of such a model? This is, of course, a variant of a question we've faced as a society back to the Luddites and beyond. It's not clear that we have a good answer for it yet.
posted by Pemdas at 6:27 AM on September 29 [1 favorite]

There seem to be two different, but related, ethical problems surrounding the use of AI. The first is the elimination of jobs. Our society decided long ago that anything that could be mechanized, should be, and that it's fine for machines to wipe their asses with human labor; that human labor equates to the worth of a human life in our society isn't really important, if some middle-aged person who loses work isn't pretty enough to become an Instagram influencer, fuck 'em, let them sleep on the sidewalk. Okay. But then the other issue is whether AI is ethically a suitable replacement for human labor on the user end. Can AI do the job as well as a human -- for the most part, the answer is obviously No -- and if it fails to do the job well enough, how bad is the result for the user? Is it bad enough to result in criminal prosecution for the developer of the AI? Can the developer muster up a good enough legal defense to protect themselves from the consequences of their actions? If so...
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:40 AM on September 29 [8 favorites]

Our society decided long ago that anything that could be mechanized, should be

Once upon a time, the promise here was that this would generate so much wealth to go around and it would free us from all drudgery, so we would all have the time to study humanities, make and consume art, and generally be nice to each other.

I guess the wealth thing happened, but not the spreading around.

On your other point... I've recently been fuming about a furnace protection plan from a large company that I signed onto. I phoned to book the annual inspection... there was going to be at least a 20 min wait on hold. Nope. I logged into their online site, and looked for available dates... nothing in October. What? Ok screw this, let's go with somebody else. Wait... even though it's a monthly payment, I'm contractually obligated to pay for the year, which is up next August.

I guess my point there is that sh1tty seems to be the default setting, AI or not. For both the worker and the customer.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:16 AM on September 29 [10 favorites]

Look, Ted Giola’s books on jazz are great. They’re excellent, readable works of academic-level research, that provide both a history and technical details.

However…

Giola’s late stage career has seen him deeply infatuated with substack, which sees him write very short articles like “Spotify is bad”, or “streaming is bad”, or “AI is bad”, publish them on substack, and get a bunch of attention. It’s not that he’s wrong, but they’re quite repetitive - market forces don’t want you to have this, makes money for people but doesn’t work for listeners - but despite his acuity he never comes close to his level of writing on jazz. Perhaps it’s because jazz, or the jazz he was writing about, is a closed subject, or perhaps he’s just trying to whip people up so they subscribe to his substack.
posted by The River Ivel at 7:25 AM on September 29 [4 favorites]

Metafilter is filled with content. Surrounding the links is way more text put there by the “members” of Metafilter, those who ponied up the one time entry fee. But each of us chooses to add that content when we individually bother to start entering text into a Post Comment edit box. No one is forcing me to type this. I am consciously deciding to contribute to the conversation myself. And if someone decides to critique what I say, well that’s the conversation I chose to join. As much as I hate this AI bullshit, I also realize that somebody may scrape my text into the howling mouth of AI despite my hate for that. There are no ads attached to my text, no one is making money off of my words, as far as I know… Metafilter is not TikTok. There is no comparison. All of us here can be content creators, but our motivation is sharing and conversation. Typing this is not my job.
posted by njohnson23 at 7:32 AM on September 29 [8 favorites]

Full automation will not free the poor from labor. It will free the rich from the poor.
posted by notoriety public at 8:08 AM on September 29 [19 favorites]

He says Google is leeching off newspapers and journalists. How?
posted by jabah at 8:08 AM on September 29 [1 favorite]

In Soviet Metafilter, Content is you!
posted by torokunai at 8:28 AM on September 29 [4 favorites]

To answer myself, maybe he means google leaches off journalism via AdSense. I know there was that AMP debacle, but I think it did itself in, to use the new smalltalk.
posted by jabah at 9:06 AM on September 29 [1 favorite]

In a broader sense, advertising dollars used to go to magazines and newspapers. Now they largely go to google for directing people to the websites of magazines and newspapers.
posted by Zalzidrax at 9:11 AM on September 29 [7 favorites]

Ted Chiang was recently on Paul Giamatti's podcast, and he made an interesting point about AI.

He was saying that removal of people from doing jobs that they love really started with the modern era's embrace of the venture capitalist model, and that AI is just the latest symptom of that, at least in regards to jobs.

I feel like he's right. Reducing our workload to free us up for more interesting pursuits was never the actual goal. It's becoming more and more clear that it was about cutting jobs, like in Succession. And us peons whose jobs are being wiped out are being put into the "NRPI" category on the balance sheet. No real people involved.
posted by ishmael at 9:18 AM on September 29 [7 favorites]

Not that it’s particularly important to his argument, but I bet that ’10% of known species are parasites’ is mainly a fact about biologists, not a fact about parasites.

i.e. I bet the real number is much higher but that not enough people are doing parasite taxonomy.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 9:20 AM on September 29 [3 favorites]

Giamatti's podcast is excellent, by the way. Always an interesting long-form discussion on topics like mythology, UFOs, and film. The guests are pretty great (aforementioned Chiang, Stephen Colbert, Bill Hader, various experts) and he co-hosts with good friend Stephen Asma, who has a philosophy background.
posted by ishmael at 9:21 AM on September 29 [4 favorites]

Off-topic, but I've always liked Giamatti, so my first thought was, "Oh, cool, Paul Giamatti has a podcast!" But then I was like, "Paul Giamatti is rich. He doesn't need to do a podcast! Shouldn't this space be reserved for voices that don't have another in?" Of course, other people with pre-existing fame (or generational/familial wealth) have podcasts that I enjoy a lot; this is just something that goes through my mind each time I discover a new one. Anyway, it does seem to dovetail a little with the whole question of marginalized workers being pushed out of jobs by larger forces (as yet, no one can push you out of podcasting -- as yet!! -- but certainly people with preloaded fame can suck the air out of the room).
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:27 AM on September 29 [4 favorites]

I live in a countrified neighborhood where deer often graze on my front lawn

"'I never thought parasite capitalism would exploit my labor,' sobs man who voted for Destroy The Middle Class party."

Years ago when I did strategy consulting to Fortune 500 clients, we would sometimes devise parasite strategies (that’s exactly what we called them). But we did this simply as a thought exercise—we never actually presented these ideas to clients.

"It's just a thought exercise, bro!" LOL, nobody believes that.
posted by AlSweigart at 12:11 PM on September 29 [7 favorites]

It's false that "large professional businesses rarely engaged in these practices, until quite recently" and "the parasites certainly didn’t live in billionaire mansions".

Academic publishers were clearly parasites since the internet started, but really since they were all stolen during the Holocaust, and likely before since they were worth stealing. We knew music industry was famously exploitive even before the internet. Monsanto was traditional destroying seed handling companies for decades.

As for Real Estate, Elizabeth Magie creates The Landlord's Game before 1902, which we call Monopoly today. We've viewed bankers as practices like forever too.

Also..

"The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be 'free' because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free." - Julian Assange
posted by jeffburdges at 12:36 PM on September 29 [4 favorites]

He says Google is leeching off newspapers and journalists. How?

My guess is that their search monopoly generates revenue for them on content they don't own but remotely control general access to.
posted by Brian B. at 1:11 PM on September 29 [3 favorites]

He says Google is leeching off newspapers and journalists. How?

I mean, certainly they make money off ads which used to be used to support journalism. 40 years ago ads and classifieds made newspapers possible financially. The ad industry has restructured its spending in a way that is slowly (or in some cases, quickly) murdering newspapers and journalism, in part because it's very hard to restructure the funding model for newspapers when those things change so radically. What do you replace them with? Subscriptions?

That's all well and good if you're a national concern like the NYT, but how many of us are subscribing to the East Nowhere Ledger? And once the East Nowhere Ledger closes up shop, the dominoes start to fall and pretty soon the midsize papers are in real trouble. Right now, to pick a random example, the Houston Chronicle is offering 6 months of access for 99 cents. 99 cents! They've got to get 5 or 6 subscribers just to buy a cup of coffee that has to last half a year. Obviously that's not the only way they support themselves, but the point is that their options ain't what they used to be.

Google does an end-run around all of that, by indexing the Chronicle or the Ledger's sites and thereby making them discoverable, but also de-localizing all these things. The people of Houston buy the Chronicle in part to find out what's happening in Houston, but those of us from elsewhere that get driven to their site by a Google result couldn't give a shit what the hottest local Houston restaurants are. But if they want to compete for traffic (which means ad impressions) that means they have to rejigger their resource allocation in a way that probably hurts a lot of that more local reporting (of course, they can't excise it entirely because it's the coverage of local stuff that becomes a moneymaker when a local story gains national attention).

Meanwhile Google could care less if the Chronicle goes under because there's another paper waiting to take its place in the search rankings at any moment. Of course, until there isn't anymore, but in the meantime the GOOG line goes up so everything is working out great.
posted by axiom at 1:40 PM on September 29 [8 favorites]

He doesn't mention ETF or index funds that create additional price demand on the share prices of companies in the fund. S&P 500 goes up, so does an index fund made of its companies. They outperform most dynamic investment management but that additional price demand is an accelerant for the "line goes up" situation.
posted by k3ninho at 3:55 PM on September 29 [4 favorites]

He says Google is leeching off newspapers and journalists. How?

I agree with what was said above by others; but also: I didn't see if anyone mentioned Google's monopoly on website advertising.

Newspapers give away their ad revenue to Google. They're forced to run ads how and where Google demands them (Google owns the ad framework). They're forced to bend their articles to please Google's algorithm (aka Google's business model).

And the biggest issue of all:

Prices are set by Google, not by newspapers — the more local the paper, the bigger this problem is. As much as Google's PR wants everyone to think of them as an impartial bidding platform for ads, it's not. Nobody knows what they're bidding for — only Google does. It's a black box. But it's a monopoly so it continues.
posted by UN at 12:05 AM on September 30 [5 favorites]

Parasitism is the motherfucking dream. Imagine making a living off other people's work. Lifestyle-wise, It's second only to the type of wealth where you can live off the interest which is parasitism of the self.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 2:16 AM on September 30 [2 favorites]

This is pretty dumb and breaks down pretty fast if you bother to give it any thought at all.

The value that Facebook creates is substantially similar to the value that AT&T created; networks have value. Was AT&T a parasite on everyone's conversation? If Facebook didn't add any value, Classmates.com would still be around.

Likewise, Spotify basically killed large scale music piracy. And there, the real problem is that the value each individual piece of music adds to the average person's life is very little; they're worth a lot, in aggregate, and the platform that aggregates them is then worth a lot, but with literally billions of songs, and the ability to hear most of it free on YouTube, means that of course a mass aggregation distribution scheme is only worthwhile if it's a feeder to your specific distribution that you can earn money off of.

The case is better with journalism, where places like Google and Facebook literally reproduce their work while selling new ads on it, but he doesn't offer a lot worth thinking about here either.
posted by klangklangston at 12:18 PM on September 30 [1 favorite]

The thing is, we did all this to ourselves. We all fell over ourselves to propel Google from the garage to where Alphabet is today. We all signed up for every iteration of increasingly invasive, shitty social media platforms and spewed out our inner thoughts as fodder for future AI consumption without a thought as to why. We willingly adopted digital music devices with no idea how much we valued the experience of playing an album of songs and holding a lovingly crafted album cover in our hands. We welcomed our future masters with open arms, ignoring the knives behind their backs.

We stopped buying newspapers, CDs, magazines, books and everything else that we once consumed and treasured in a physical sense, but which have now become just part of the endless and omnipresent overload of data washing over us every minute of every day, with none of it having any real value. We don't even notice most of it.

We did this to ourselves and have no right to cry because the inevitable consequences are not to our liking.
posted by dg at 4:36 PM on September 30 [2 favorites]

I suppose it’s true we did this to ourselves… but it happened because some of these services (not all) offered genuine improvements for the people using them. Websites like Google, Craigslist, Twitter, and even Facebook had huge, positive impacts in their early years.

The failure, like so many failures of the modern world, is that they were allowed to become monopolies. That their (perhaps somewhat justified) success was not taxed and used to preserve the valuable parts of the industries they disrupted and confused.

But it’s not like we should have expected the public at large to forgo actual improvements to their lives out of some sense of duty to older, also flawed institutions.

I do not think the answer here is that we all should have kept buying newspaper classified ads.
posted by learning from frequent failure at 6:31 PM on September 30

Companies like Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, Zillow, etc are essentially middlemen companies that provide some matching of supply and demand then skim off the top in exchange - they're not actually producing things, they're redistributing and allocating things (Yes, I'm aware Amazon has a significant cloud computing business, but even many of those customers are operating off the same basic business model - for the most part Amazon is still at best a contributing factor in production). It's a perfectly legitimate need to fulfill and there's nothing wrong with getting paid for it, but it's a real problem when they take a bigger cut than the actual producers. I don't think the value they provide is nothing but it's definitely less than their market cap.

American capitalism and "tech" are broken at a basic level. Low interest rates encourage speculation because the cost of money is almost free so you throw it at startups with the potential to become a monopoly and a decade plus of it since the 2008 GFC has resulted in tons of malinvestment. Things are valued based on how much they can extract, not produce - companies like Uber, WeWork, etc that got billions in venture capitalist money are rent collectors. Their innovation is in business models, not actual technology that results in productivity gains. It's depressing that almost all economic news coverage adopts the perspective that profits are good - that might be true from the narrow perspective of a single corporation, but for the average person, things like what quality of life they can afford is much more important.
posted by ndr at 8:11 PM on September 30 [2 favorites]

The idea that we could have somehow all banded together and kept buying newspaper ads and classifieds is ridiculous, I agree. The advent of the Internet made getting your news via a bundle of physical paper some kid on a bike chucks onto your porch every day unsustainable. It's almost a law of nature. Systems have natural equilibria until they get disrupted severely enough that a new settling point must be found.

Right now, as ndr points out, we're in a period where free money (and the presence of a global telecommunications network) have sufficiently disrupted the state of the system in a way that makes the old newspaper model impossible to sustain. People will still want to know what's going on, so I don't think journalism will wholly disappear. Changes in the availability of free money may make the "throw VC money at the thing so it becomes artificially cheap" less viable, but the internet is here to stay, and the leverage it grants is going to mean we'll be able to make do with fewer journalists than we did 40 years ago. I do think it's possible to legislate some of the business practices (like repackaging other people's content) out of widespread use but there doesn't seem to be much political will for that. Probably the size of the lobbies for FAANG vs Knight-Ridder/Gannett/Hearst/etc. has something to do with that.
posted by axiom at 9:57 PM on October 1 [1 favorite]

"The advent of the Internet made getting your news via a bundle of physical paper some kid on a bike chucks onto your porch every day unsustainable."

I subscribe to three newspapers, and one of them I get physically once a week because I like the comics. Each costs less than Netflix.
posted by klangklangston at 10:55 PM on October 3 [1 favorite]

Coming to this late, but surprised no one mentioned the real reason Google hurts newspapers/media: by providing summaries of published articles at the top of search results thus keeping readers from ever clicking through.

That's what all the newspapers and magazines I work for are hurt most by.
posted by jordantwodelta at 5:54 PM on October 5 [2 favorites]