2023-06-07: Current Events and Enshittification
The news is a perpetual episode of "I Love Lucy"
I just shouldn’t write about current events
Man, have events overtaken some of what I have written recently:
I was surprised that Chris Licht was shown the door that quickly, but it looked bad from the outside even before Alberta’s piece and untenable after that. I will cosign Jay Rosen’s tweet:
The PGA Tour and LIV Golf have agreed to unify. I am not in the habit of expecting large pools of social conscience from the PGA, so I suppose this isn’t all that surprising on a certain level. I don’t have a lot of time to pay attention to golf as it is; I imagine this will reduce that time on the margins for me. I suspect it helps to avoid a longer-term crisis for its target audience.
The Athletics-to-Vegas deal is in limbo for now. I railed enough against it earlier; I am happy to see Vegas dig in a little.
Enshittification
I have had this in the bullpen since I started the Substack, but today seems like a good day to pull it out. I have been monitoring the freakout over Twitch’s TOS over the last 24 hours or so with some interest. I don’t stream and I don’t actually watch a ton of Twitch these days (I had a phase maybe 3 years ago where I would second-window it quite a lot), so the angst doesn’t hit too hard for me.
But it did make me think about enshittification—props for Cory Doctorow for coining a profane neologism for us to use to describe a common phenomenon:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
I would argue that this affects most of the major platforms these days. Trying to buy something useful on Amazon is a pain in the ass. Facebook has made about 50 transitions in its lifetime, the only one of which that added value that wasn’t already there was going mobile. Google services are much less useful—and way more intrusive—than they seemed to be if we go back 6 to 10 years (and, of course, they have legendarily abandoned so many products in that window). Twitter put Parler out of business by making it redundant in what appears to be a questionable business strategy. Doctorow has already discussed Uber as a bezzle; I also find it hard to refute that argument, particularly as an Uber is now the same price as a taxi, give or take. I’m not a big Adobe person, but they have managed to anger almost everyone I know who is in Adobe World, about half of whom are now at least dinking around on competitors platforms. And Doctorow is actually making this argument about TikTok, which seems as though it might be toward the front end of this process.
Since I’m a regular listener of “On The Media,” I note that Doctorow talks about this in three recent segments: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.
I am mindful that I am literally contributing value—very, very little value, but value all the same—to a platform company that may very well being on the same trajectory. There was already a lot of controversy when I hopped aboard, and I think it’s a fair argument. My inclination was that I wanted to do things other than what I was doing on Tumblr, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time futzing around with technical issues, and almost all the bloggers I read were moving here. This might be in the category of “if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you,” but I spent a little time looking at options and it seemed to work, at least for now. I have no idea what the future holds. One of the Substacks I read regularly is Ted Gioia’s—and he’s been a huge fan of disintermediation for writers and likes the platform enough to have become a shareholder. He is very critical of the music streaming platforms, though, in a way that sounds a lot like enshittification.
I don’t want to be unduly mean about it, since I have friends and/or coworkers at all these places, and others who are at other large platform companies. I’ve also spent more of my career in platform companies than not, but they were much, much smaller “platforms,” to the point of being different in both size and kind. But this also seems like a thing that is clearly happening.
Today’s Soccer Content
Messi is apparently headed to Inter Miami. I still always have concerns when older players coming over to MLS, which I guess is residual trauma from the NASL, which still might have had the more impressive cast of late-career characters: Pelé, Beckenbauer, Best, Cruyff, Chinaglia, Eusébio, Müller, etc. I have a feeling Messi will be fine, though:
Update: as I was writing, Neil Paine’s most recent Substack came in:
I am realizing now that I forgot Hugo Sánchez, who, along with Wegerle, played in both the NASL and MLS:
Jude Bellingham is headed to Real Madrid. Apparently, the transfer fee is €103m with some add-ons. That’s a staggering pile of money, but it’s less than many of the numbers that had been thrown out there. I get that Liverpool doesn’t generally pay in that transfer class, but he’s a hell of a young talent and it would have been nice to get him.
Unlikely Music
This Jason Isbell tweet is already legendary:
This came up back when Rupert Hine died. I think of him most, of course, as the guy who produced “Presto” and “Roll the Bones.” But he was more of a New Wave guy as a producer—as an artist on his own, he was more of a folk guy. But he was one of the producers on “Private Dancer” and brought the Fixx guys in; “You Better Be Good To Me” sounds so much like a Fixx song with Tina Turner (RIP) on it:
“Private Dancer,” though was produced by John Carter. Actually, quick aside: go check out everyone who contributed to the record—it’s an amazing and eclectic group. And they ended up having all the Dire Straits guys play on the track except for Knopfler; Jeff Beck (also RIP) played the solo.
In Other News
So I’m reading this interview with Ellen Pompeo and Katherine Heigl and laughing about it having been 18 years since the “Grey’s Anatomy” premiered. One of the things it makes me realize, maybe even appreciate, is the value of having 57 channels and nothin’ on. The 57 has become hundreds, of course, which has created a massive media hole—which has allowed the space for 750 episodes of “The Simpsons” and over 400 of “Grey’s Anatomy,” along with any number of mega-long-running game shows, reality series, sports reporting, “South Park” episode concepts, Sunday morning preachers, talking head-fests, concert series, and Victory Gardens. I think Ted Gioia might note that this is a sign of a lack of dynamism in the culture, which is possible, but I think it’s more a function of ubiquity than a lack of quality (I think he would also say that some of these damn stories just need to end). The “Grey’s Anatomy” phenomenon, which was so big culturally at one point and is more just large niche catalog programming these days, is just a marker of that change in the landscape.
BBC: Crocodile trolls gender realists.
AAPOR is looking for Editor(s) for Public Opinion Quarterly and an EIC for the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology.
Rowland and I were talking about folks from the Commercial Music program at LBCC back in the day, and I had forgotten about Maurice Love and so wanted to just drop this Discogs.org link for him.
RIP The Iron Sheik, you Jabronis
Even those of us who have not been invested in pro wrestling for a good long time are sad about the passing of the Iron Sheik:
As JuRY points out, his actual biography is interesting enough to make a movie out of. My best to his family, friends, and legion of fans.