The Chaos at Condé Nast
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Was writing for newspapers and magazines around this time. Never for Conde Nast, but my impression was nobody in that business knew how to make money, it had already been made and they were just spending it like a third generation inheritance. They rode coattails in and while there were a few sharks on the corporate side, below the first name or two on the masthead it was hangers-on all the way down. It was a bubble.
The '00's were this odd period where it was easy to be seduced by the idea you could be famous for being clever. Men published and even read literary fiction. Before it became the troubled former child star of content it is today, Vice was actually a funny and subversive upstart. Book launches were society events. Being a columnist was a thing. It's hard to see how excesses of that period could be relevant today.
I commented on them in a previous thread about reddit, odd to see them here again. If Conde Nast is still staffed by people who cut their teeth in that era, they're going to need restructuring.
Your opening point was poorly articulated. The US has a literacy rate of 99%. Similar rates prevail throughout the developed world.
No, no, no. Being an asshole is not a signal you are creative. It's a signal of limited market options for the people that have to put up with you. In this case, there were a limited number of "cool" magazines in NYC to work at an extreme amounts of competition for the limited spots.
You know what group of people are crazy creative and not assholes? Session musicians. It's literally their job to show up and make up something good on the spot, but equally importantly, not derail the production with bullshit. And you know why? Because the people working with them have lots of other options for the most part.
Even when they talk about it today you can smell the pretentiousness, grandiose fake nihilism and the sorry-not-sorry in their words.
And these vapid know-it-alls are still calling the shots today in terms of "culture", bad words and cancel culture. It's mostly not in print but these people have an amazing capability of putting themselves close to power and money.
Who would fake nihilism? And why?
They are invariably politically leftists. Which is where contemporary "bad words and cancel culture" come from.
The irony of being ostensibly "leftist" while flashing a 0.1% lifestyle of "knowing the room service menu at the Ritz by heart" and getting high in first class.
You may be referring to a particular brand of "excuse me for being a degenerate occasionally, but you know my heart is in the right place and I'm a friend of the proletariat" sort of leftism, but it's definitely not a nihilism and they'll definitely parrot the right leftist lines at parties or they'll lose their little perch in a heartbeat.
There's also the traditional aristocratic looking-down-upon-the-bourgeois for their grubby and banal mindsets, which has got sort of subsumed into leftism because there aren't many aristocrats left. Adorno is a kind of good exposition of this sort of thing.
Lastly, it's very traditional. The French revolution, at least in the early stages, was basically bankrolled and sheltered by L Phillipe de Orlean, the first prince of the blood.
Clearly they aren't actually nihilists because they care about money and status.
But I did once work with a "Chief Architect of Data Science" who was only putting in 10 hours a week remotely for what was supposed to be a full time position.
The magic trifecta was that he was well credentialed, somebody's crony, and completely full of shit; so the hedge fund guys employing him didn't know any better.
There are a number of other parts of this article that look bad, but why is this one a big deal? At the more meeting-intensive jobs I've had, it's near the center of the bell curve.
Eventually I realized that publishing, like much of the rest of New York, is built on the principle of 1%er ideology, where the actual workers get hosed and say “Thank you,” while a select few kings (mostly queens now) with the right connections, family background, and bravado live very high on the hog.
More interesting still is how some 1%'rs (e.g. Bezos) will operate something like the Washington Post at a loss simply to retain the actual power that having a top tier media company provides, in terms of narrative control.
> select few kings (mostly queens now)
It's still going to be investors behind the scenes who really pull these strings. The name at the top of the masthead isn't the owner....
If you're a replaceable cog in the machine, you're probably not getting paid much. If you want to get rich in a capitalist society, either have scarse skills allowing you a good bargaining position or find a way to own the means of production.
The reason you're not Facebook today isn't that you can't get ahold of some servers. The reason you're not CNN isn't that you can't afford a video camera sufficient for news reporting. The reason you're not Starbucks isn't that you lack the capacity to make coffee.
The reasons the workers can't strike out out their own without capital in the modern world are increasingly regulatory barriers and gatekeeping.
It would be a lot easier to build your own Facebook if you could bootstrap on their social graph with the permission of the users but not of Facebook, but then there's the CFAA and the DMCA etc. It would be a lot easier to build your own CNN if we had a system for small anonymous irreversible micropayments with correspondingly low transaction costs, but then there's the byzantine hellscape of financial regulations and KYC laws. It would be a lot easier to build your own Starbucks if you could start off by operating out of your own home, but tell that to zoning regulations that prohibit commerce in the residential areas where your customers live.
It's no longer about the means of production. Now the problem is that the regulatory barriers to entry give advantage to larger entities with more scale, but the larger the entity is the more people there are at the bottom of the pyramid.
The reason you're not starbucks isn't that you can't serve coffee out of your house. Do you think that independent coffee houses don't exist? Do you think that new coffee franchises don't come into being regularly?
The reason you're not facebook has nothing to do with dmca or cfaa (relatively easy to comply with regulations). Do you think that facebook didn't have to deal with that when they started? They were hardly the first social network either so its not like they had first-movers advantage.
But that makes it a completely different problem. There is no longer a prohibitively expensive "means of production" causing the problem, to which a solution might have been collective ownership, but now instead a collection of barriers to entry to what might otherwise reasonably have been employee-owned businesses if not for the barriers that increase the scale required for success past what the employees can afford.
> The reason you're not starbucks isn't that you can't serve coffee out of your house.
Sure it is. If you can't serve it out of your house then you have to buy separate commercial property from where you live in order to start out. That dramatically increases the barrier to entry and excludes most of the prospective entrants. It also makes it that much more likely for the small entities that do exist to fail, because they have higher expenses. So you get more Starbucks and fewer independent coffee shops than you would have otherwise.
> The reason you're not facebook has nothing to do with dmca or cfaa (relatively easy to comply with regulations).
It's not about compliance costs in that case, it's about the regulations prohibiting a method of competition (adversarially bootstrapping from a competitor's social graph), which entrenches the incumbents.
> Do you think that facebook didn't have to deal with that when they started? They were hardly the first social network either so its not like they had first-movers advantage.
It's not about first-movers advantage either. It's about rules that promote scale and thwart competition, by e.g. de facto inhibiting network forks. It's why Facebook (or whoever is winning this year) has a billion users instead of there being nobody that big and thousands of independently operated community networks each with a fraction of the users.
The problem isn't that nobody can be Facebook. Facebook is clearly Facebook. The problem is that there shouldn't be this much consolidation, and making your own Facebook is harder than it ought to be.
Startup capital is still very much a problem you need to solve to start a businesses. Its just spent on different things than people did in the 1800s
What people can't afford now is to scale to the entity size necessary in this regulatory environment. Collective ownership doesn't solve that -- these huge conglomerates are already "collectively owned" in the sense that everybody owns one ten-millionth of them in their retirement account. The problem is that the entity size is too large for your one ten-millionth to allow you to exercise any meaningful control over the company. So the solution now has to be a larger number of smaller companies, and a regulatory environment that facilitates rather than impedes that.
If people can't start selling coffee out of their homes because of zoning, and can't start selling coffee out of a shop downtown because they can't afford that property in addition to their homes, I have a hard time seeing how any relaxation of antitrust is going to improve that.
Billionaires are way above the 1%.
the Post has been profitable since 2017. https://www.axios.com/washington-post-1515418495-9c9dc541-16...
Say what you will about Condé Nast, this implosion is poignant for anyone who has dreamed of supporting themselves with mere words.
These days, the only "reader" that seems to pay enough for my keyboard time is Babel. ;)
Wait, if my math is correct he became editor at 28. Was that common at the time? (circa 2000)
So I could totally see them promoting a 28-year-old man to editor and thereby manufacture a bit of stardom to help with their image.