Is it that unbelievable that its role in a years-long effort to destroy a good man's reputation, as well as in a coverup of that effort, has made your organization disliked by more than one person?
Crowdfunding only works if you have a preexisting platform. Otherwise, it's just going to embarrass you. It's not zero-risk either, because if you start a Kickstarter and it fails, you can never remove the evidence (and the social anti-proof involved in a failed campaign). For authors--reputation ends up being a big deal because it takes 10+ hours of human effort to tell if a book is any good--this sort of thing can be fatal.
Also, it's much harder to build a platform organically than it used to be. I was semifamous in the 2010s and was literally almost killed for it. (Some people who were high in Y Combinator were on the wrong side of history there, but I digress.) So, I know how these systems actually work and how to exploit them (if one wants to go black hat). The game of getting attention is more competitive these days because there are so many more spammers, bad actors, and general-issue crapflooders. You can buy 10,000 fake Twitter followers for less than a hundred bucks and you probably won't get caught or face any negative consequences; on the other hand, getting from zero to 1000 legitimate followers is really difficult (much harder than it was in 2010).
At that level, definitely not in it for the money. At the C level though I got the sense that there was supreme respect for the cultural role of publishers - but it was a narrow second to business concerns, and they would make that tradeoff if necessary.
The "cultural role" is drummed up in order to get people to work on below-subsistence salaries.
It's probably more about ego than money for the high-level people. Since people are cheap (because "passion") they can have large teams under them without their organizations having to pay the typical costs of large teams.
The truth about it, though, is that the culture is too balkanized for any of this stuff to make sense. Very few people go out of their way to read or find the best books; for good or for bad, they've all self-segregated into warring
genres and subgenres--and the so-called "literary" crowd who insist their genre is not a genre are often the worst in this regard. The balkanization is probably why no one knows how to market books anymore; people really understand a small slice of the total readership and, in any case, the lines are always changing.
Yep, and how so many publishers want your own platform stats. I know people with large insta followings getting book deals purely because they can market their own books and cost publishers next to nothing, with an almost guaranteed profit.
Right, and this is basically an admission of their own uselessness. They'll only help you if you can prove you don't need the help. They're rent-seekers at this point.
To be fair, it is a hard problem. In the visual arts, you can tell if someone is talented immediately. With authors, especially in fiction, there's about a 12-hour commitment before one even knows if they know how to begin, carry, and finish a story. Literary agents, who are supposed to be the gatekeepers, are beyond useless at it (although it is worthwhile to get one, if you can, because you need one to be a serious player in traditional publishing).
There are tiers of what it means to "get published".
If you want your book to get a decent editor and maybe get a print run in the three or four digits, you don't have to deal with all the faddish bukkake (social media presence, trendy subject matter, performative wokery designed to signal virtue without actually changing anything or challenging capitalism, dodging cancel mobs). You can just write, and you may be able to find an audience organically if you put time and money into it. You probably won't, however, make enough money to write full time.
If your focus is on getting set up to make enough money to write full time, then you do have to worry about all that garbage, because there just aren't many good book deals to go around.
The present reality is that all publishers have been reduced to vanity press, and they don't realize it yet.
In theory, publishers provide a real service, because self-publishing well is expensive (four, five digits easily). In theory, they should be offering access to people who couldn't afford what it costs to self-publish to the expected standard. In practice? The only people who can get in are people who have the connections and financial resources not to need the help. Whoops.
What we're learning about publishing (which we already knew, those of us who've been studying it) is that no one is good at selling books. Most self-publishers aren't, most traditional publishers aren't, and most PR firms are only good at taking and spending your money. We just don't have a good understanding of why individuals buy books (it changes) and there's a lot of evidence, sadly, that book sales are only loosely correlated to the quality of the writing (in the long term, quality matters more, but a book that dies in the short term won't have a long term).
Entitlement is a weird concept, especially since it is now used as a pejorative only to connote false senses of entitlement (i.e., when people believe they are owed things but have no logical basis for the belief). This deprives us of the language to describe situations in which people actually are, legitimately, entitled to certain things.
I am of the mindset that the decent functioning of human society is an entitlement and that people who deliberately cause dysfunction (such as Davos assholes, who are deliberately destroying the U.S. middle class to set some weird kind of example) should be treated as reneging criminals and removed from power using whatever means are necessary. Some people coat doorknobs in feces (or, say, found companies with terrible cultures, support capitalism past its deserving end-of-life) simply because they enjoy the thrill of being the cause; others among us, people of culture, are entitled to a society that protects us from the fecal spreaders. That's literally why we permit the state to exist; so it will protect us. However, it does a terrible job these days.
But yes, it is true that, absent the existence of human society, I am owed nothing (since the lions and gazelles and wolves clearly owe me nothing).
The problem is that programmers answer to idiots, but nevertheless those idiots have certain reptilian sensibilities in which they exceed us, and a consequence of this is that they have a knack for zero-sum power grabs and pissing contests. So, even though those people are 30-50 IQ points below us, they nevertheless end up remaining on top, and there isn't really much we can do about it unless we're prepared to burn down a whole socioeconomic system (which I am, but most people aren't there yet).
"Sprints" are supposed to be humiliating. The very message is that you're not trusted with even two fucking weeks of your own (!!) working time. It could not be clearer. If you work in sprints, it's because the higher-ups think you're a child and a loser, and you'll never be able to overcome that negative inference, because if you perform poorly you will confirm it and if you perform well, you will confirm that their micromanagement actually works--there is no winning.
Also, "Waterfall" never really existed. It was a straw man invented to sell this Agile bukkake.
In any case, a number of the dysfunctions are, in effect, intentional. Standups that go on for 45+ minutes? Long meetings are a classic way for managers to punish perceived underperformers (or, in Agile terms, "impediments") when they're not entirely sure who problem player is. The theory is that the rest of
"the team" (I put this term in quotes because coworkers in corporate aren't an actual team--that's just management speak--but are often pitted against each other) will get sick of the incessant meetings and rat out the underperformer who is causing this wastage of time. The humiliations of Jira and "user stories" aren't bureaucratic accidents that occurred in good faith; they hurt because they're supposed to hurt.
It's not that consumer debt "helps to fuel" the economy; consumer debt is the only reason the economy hasn't collapsed in on itself already.
Henry Ford wasn't a good person. He was a rabid antisemite. But even he knew that he wouldn't be able to sell cars indefinitely if people couldn't afford to buy them, so he raised wages. The bosses, as a class, no longer have to do this. They can make enough fake money out of debt to keep their businesses alive. So that's what they're doing.
All this means we get artificial mediocre prosperity that is contingent on their piles of money getting bigger (i.e., all economic growth, meager as it has been, goes to them). And we know that they are willing to crash everything (or, to give an example that has actually happened, make lots of people sick with Covid-19) to keep themselves in charge and their piles of money growing bigger.
If the consumer debt game ended for some reason, the whole system would collapse immediately.
This is true. There is no evidence that we're on track for a state in which money is meaningless. Rather, the evidence is strong that we're on track for one in which money represents one's share of the corruptly attained and corruptly retained asymmetric state services called "property rights" [1] and in which labor (of value approaching zero) has nothing to do with it.
Without a complete overthrow of corporate capitalism, we're going to regress to the state of medieval Europe and many of the poorest, most corrupt countries today, in which there are people who have money and there are people who work but it is impossible to get meaningful money by working.
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[1] Please note that there's a distinction between personal property and private property. You're not an asshole for wanting people not to take stuff you need for personal use, such as your car and your books and your toiletries. That's personal property, which is a different thing. If we take this reasonable idea, though, and run it up without attention to how it might behave at scale, though, we run the risk of enabling the kind of nightmarish private property that afflicts countries like the US, inevitably leading to extreme inequality, intractable political corruption, and metastatic governmental dysfunction.
Housing is (along with healthcare in the US) a big part of why most people in the so-called "rich world" are in fact dismally poor, only one missed paycheck or turn of bad luck away from life becoming unlivable.
For most of us poors, money is a tool we need to survive. For the people who have the bulk of it, it's a weapon. And we're the targets. They love blowing us up; it's what they do. They care more about making others suffer than the material comforts (to which hedonic adaptation accrues quick) money affords. Putting the few "good jobs", the few jobs that offer us even a sliver of a chance (like 1%, but we're expected to work as if it were 95%) of being something more than an exploited worker, in congested and dysfunctional expensive cities is something they do because it's hilarious to them.
Barring a complete and final overthrow of corporate capitalism, you can't escape this crapsack world. The important land is already owned by reptilian shitasses. Billions of people are going without drinking water while a bunch of psychopaths fly around in private jets, destroying the planet because they find it comical.
You're proposing a false dichotomy: that we either go back to an agrarian lifestyle or accept the status quo.
Technology is a good thing. Industry is a good thing. We can keep them.
What we don't need is the ruling class. They take the lion's share of the resources, and they don't do anything useful to justify what we pay to subsidize their pampered existences. We can rip them out and things will still work.
This. Corporations are great at imposing mean-spirited personal accountability (i.e., if you're perceived to have fucked up, you get fucked) but that doesn't actually solve problems or change anything. People get fired, careers end, new faces replace the old, nothing gets learned. Of course, once you get into middle management you're exempted from the stack-ranking bukkake, and executives write their own performance reviews and almost never face consequences for their actions.
Companies are fantastic at making it look like accountability exists, because people at the bottom get punished for even the smallest mistakes, but avoiding any consequences that would affect high-ranking members or force the organization to change how it does business.
The speculation was that we'd all have to become artists or poets, since, obviously creative work would be out of the reach of AI.
It's debatable--it goes back to Barthes's "death of the author", whether art's value and meaning resides solely in viewer perception or also in author intention--whether AI art will be "true" art, but it will very soon be good enough to replace artists who work in subordinate contexts (which is, unfortunately, generally a necessity if one wants to survive within the reigning corporate-capitalist totalitarianism).
AI is not going to force us to "become artists and poets", because it will make it even harder to earn money (i.e., the stuff most people have to earn through humiliating subordination) at these things. It will force us to become dependent, in the way artists (in practice) already are. This isn't as horrible as it sounds. The rich are already dependent on the state, which enforces their so-called "property rights"--this fact being something so-called "libertarians" are too stupid to realize. The middle classes are already dependent on employers, which turns out to suck a lot more than being a rich person dependent on the state. We already depend on complicated supply chains and national defense practices; it is simply the case that we'll soon (a) be dependent on AI, as it increasingly excels at the menial subordinate work we once relied on other people to do, and (b) be dependent on intelligent management (first coming from nation-states and UBI; later, one hopes, coming from a global entity that can eradicate poverty worldwide) of this weird quantity called "money", because we will no longer be able to reliably earn it through work, machines having taken that over (and thank God).