Follow the banter around a single term "Financialization" (setup a google news alert). It will lead you to everything else, including how the financial sectors thinking about it.
Thats cuz you think of it as a tech/content company, instead of Wall St financializing content.
In the same way they did mortgages. The people who built the houses that were sold to people who couldnt afford them, were also standing around scratching their head.
Its a joke because there is an upper limit to what the world can offer for content. Only the finance robots who run these companies believe it doesnt matter.
After all this time, Netflix hasnt been able to get more than 200-250 million subscribers, even though Startups and CEOs love to bray about how the internet is full of billions of people, just waiting to hand over their cash. The truth is vast ocean of people dont have cash.
And now the market capture phase is complete. The people who can pay, have already been corralled into pens and are milked everyday. The finance class then turns their attention to milking the "subprime" crowd. Give them credit cards. Get the advertisers involved. Reduce the VFX, content creation, animation budgets, layoff those self important expensive engineers.
Such a system doesn't generate software quality beyond a point, cuz it doesn't need it. In a few years Netflix will look like Yahoo.
Tech and Content do not run the world. Finance does. Sooner or later into the ground. Cause the goal of milking cows hits an upper limit.
How many didnt get famous? Thats what no one reports.
If the UN report on the attention economy is saying 0.5% of content produced is consumed and dropping, then how are people getting views? It doesnt make any sense. Unless the game is rigged.
People have limited attention to give anything but unlimited capacity to receive attention. The platforms are taking full advantage of that fact to keep this ponzi scheme running.
Spam and trolling even happens on a physical newspapers/radio/tv/books/magazines. Its just that you have to pay to do it.
The rich/ceremonial/leisure classes have through out history been constantly spamming everyone with whatever shit occurs to their 3 inch brains, because they can afford to buy the largest amount of attention.
To bad there is not enough attention for anything anymore cause production of content is happening at volumes that dwarf Consumption of content.
If 99% of comments and links on HN are not read by anyone, do you think the great geniuses who run HN will tell you that? Whats the use of such systems no one asks. They want to just keep it alive like some dumb engineers in the control room of Jurassic Park after the children are lost and the T Rex is loose.
The platforms, without knowing what the fuck they are building, have made it Free for everyone to Broadcast. So its now not just the rich who are spamming and trolling. Its everyone. For free. All you get is noise. Read the UN Report on the Attention Economy.
One dimensional software engineers now have capability to build and scale systems quickly. Thats the only reason we have these dumb fucking mindless systems wasting everyones time and energy.
Well someone has to pay for the tech. Its not free. And that puts an automatic upper limit on what happens.
People have no idea how much debt Police depts (lets not even talk about the military) have racked up playing with high tech toys and paying off compensation every 2 days for people they accidentally harm or kill. So whats funny here as Big Bro gets access to more and more tools the more broke he gets.
And guess what the financiers of this debt will do when it cant be paid off. Raid police pension funds. Thats how financialization of public service works
No free lunch big bro. Have fun with all the "cool toys" while the good times last.
What we are missing is industry. People and politicians by themselves really cant take on the financial sector. They are the modern day rent collecting feudal lords.
The Financial Sector(banks/insurers/real estate/stocks/bonds) has a much larger say on the allocation of resources (the economy) than anyone else including politicians and individual corporations.
The counter balance is not just people. It has to come from people+industry. The western industries have basically been hollowed out thanks to financialization.
Even Google and Apple bow to the shareholder. The shareholder doesn't do any actually work, but is sitting on his ass demanding greater rewards even if it means fucking others over, or even the entire system. Same thing with real estate and insurance. So we end up with monopolies.
Now the system is fucked, cause we have already peaked in terms of customers available to milk. Everyone is in debt to keep things afloat. The FED balance sheet has jumped from 900 billion to 9 trillion in mostly junk debt. People/Politicians we already saw during 2008 gfc folded, when they had a real shot at change.
Its in the interest of Google, Apple et al to use their influence to get on the right side of this.
VFX makes 0 sense to me as a business especially in todays over saturated content world. I have friends in DNEG were each movie has 100-200 people working on 20-25 minutes worth of footage for an ENTIRE fucking year. Thousands of people basically. And its a coin toss whether these movies are going to get the views.
Whenever I ask them how the fuck can such a business work, they just tell me erm we are just artists and coders. The job pays well so we dont ask the corporate robots too many questions about it.
And I keep pushing them to do so, cuz it doesnt make any sense given the costs involved unless it some elaborate walter white money laundering op.
Very few "best" people/"superstars" have a great track record of doing anything useful outside comfy large corp support structure. Its like moving exotic plants out of a specialized botanical garden.
In the US sure, where its blasphemous to slit the throats of the leisure classes for their excesses. In China they made Jack Ma disappear.
Through out history when it gets time for the Kings & Queens to waive the debt of the plebs away, cause they have nothing left to pay, the Rentier classes take the haircut.
In the US the rentiers have owned the Kings & Queens for a long time. To the point where any American institution cant touch them. This is not the case in China. There will be mass disappearances and cullings (already have been).
> the plight of the high-income, low-wealth American is getting worse
Solution is pretty simple. Reduce status signalling (leisure class activities and purchases) and start saving. This is what the Japanese did once the cheap credit taps were turned off. Its not the end of the world.
Michael Goldharber said it best - people have limited attention to give anything, but unlimited capacity to receive attention. Exploitation of that inequality keeps the Attention Economy afloat.
Its also why HN stays afloat, even though the architecture ensures the amount of content consumed is a small insignificant fraction of the content produced.
Ideally we track content consumed/content produced gives us a ratio of the information waste an architecture is producing. And all these architectures are producing a whole lot of waste.
Suzuki mostly sells its crap to the Indian market. Doesn't really sell much to the first world.
And Raghuram Rajan agrees. He has been saying it wont work and govt incentives should have gone to the services sector (which has been India's strength) instead of Apple - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUDaHgHC8ao
Indian labour can be a nightmare thanks to the numerous factions (religion/caste/language differences). All sides needs to be bribed to keep things running drama free. And that cuts into margins, in ways you wont see in other countries.
Services firms margins are 2-4x more than manufacturing margins, which is why their Services sector has thrived.
I have the wallet/bat token stuff turned off. Its not even turned on when you install Brave.
The main reason I moved to Brave is Firefox's bizarre updating model on Ubuntu which causes it to randomly shutdown all the time. Plus on Android, brave just blocks a ton off ads, that firefox doesn't without extensions and fiddling about.
Just dismissing it as a "crypto feature" is pure robotic mindlessness. We are past the point where crypto scammers ruled the day. The scammers/hype herd have moved on to AI.
Who is left behind holding the crypto bag, are different kind of people. Even central banks are using "crypto features" to implement CBDCs. The BAT tokens Brave has proposed is not a bad thing, even if it doesn't work out, to the problem of Attention Capture and Attention theft. We need such ideas and experiments. People's attention is not someone else's property. Google and Mozilla don't even talk about how much Attention theft is going on, leave alone what the solution is.