Spotify Employees Demanding Direct Editorial Oversight over Joe Rogan Podcasts
digitalmusicnews.com
digitalmusicnews.com
This is not the first time nor will it be the last time that a large corporation acquires some degree of power over something and wants to smooth it out for PR reasons. It has been going on since the dawn of corporate media.
Not all missing episodes feature particularly controversial guests, depending on one’s personal sensitivities.
I hope total control is hardcoded explicitly in his contract...
I'm not a fan of these podcasts, just remember who you're listening to (and that it's a group of people, not just the person who's voice you hear.)
Your use of "viable" here is imprecise. Democracy isn't doing the right thing or the best thing or the good thing or the thing that helps the most people. Democracy is just asking people to pick. It says nothing about the influences that drive them to their choices or ascribe a moral quotient to the outcome of those influences. It is perfectly viable for doing what it does. Many people would indeed argue that it's not very good at doing the other things.
> Even Spotify's execs answer to the board, which is elected by shareholders, are they somehow immune from this fan worship?
Nobody is immune. Not one of us. That's why it upsets us when people we admire fall from grace. But board members are far more likely to be people the stockholders have never heard of before than identifiable personalities.
Hypothetical side question: Do you own stock and participate in shareholder votes? I do, and I have zero clue who any of the people are when those questions come up. They may as well be asking me to pick a hand.
Given that, shouldn't we trust corporations less rather than more. Why are we pushing for corps to make decisions about what we are allowed to see and hear?
I'm going to loop back to your previous comment and address a problem that is also related to this question...
> If a tragically large numbers of people are really unable to consider two sides of an issue
There's this common trope that we should consider all sides of an issue. But issues don't have sides. People do. People have personal preferences (sometimes correctly called opinions) and data, usually partial, and then they make decisions (sometimes incorrectly also called opinions) about what to do given their personal preferences.
When we talk about "sides of an issue", we're almost always secretly talking about people who want different things. We're almost never talking about people with the same personal preferences figuring out different ways of working with the data.
Calling different base desires "different sides of an issue" is in practice extremely insidiously harmful. Almost universally, the preference differences that lead to real conflict are the splits between selfish malice and beneficence and between science and fundamentalist religious antiscience. Sometimes those two sets strongly overlap, other times not. It's "I don't want to provide someone else with healthcare if they can't pay for it." It's "Gay people shouldn't be allowed to marry." It's "We shouldn't teach evolution in schools." It's "Drink bleach to cure illness."
Calling selfishness, malice, and antiscience just "a side of the issue" gives the behavior a clean facade, normalizing it. It short-circuits honesty and gives a too convenient way to mask antisocial preferences during public discourse. "Men shouldn't be allowed to marry other men" is one example of an antisocial preference, but good luck getting any person who says it to agree that the idea is homophobic.
Talking about "considering sides of an issue" also puts shysterism and gaslighting on equal footing as honest discourse. And those should never be put on equal footing because they are inherently predatory. The world is hard enough without being constantly bombarded by peddlers of fraudulent truthiness.
Ok, now back to this question...
> Given that, shouldn't we trust corporations less rather than more.
Less/more than what? Less/more than you trust Joe Rogan? He's the one who decided that they could buy editorial control, not them.
> Why are we pushing for corps to make decisions about what we are allowed to see and hear?
We aren't and they aren't. They're making decisions about what they distribute. That's not the same thing. If Joe Rogan doesn't like it, he can leave instead of taking their 100 million dollars. I for one am always glad to have another entity decide to stop giving broad audience reach to antisocial, selfish, malicious, or antiscience idea peddlers.
I believe we are already inundated with media sources that amplify a single worldview and that is extremely harmful. Somehow considering or even listening to a different idea has become viewed as weakness and something to be avoided.
Rogan is one of the few that has an audience of people with widely varying preferences. He also does not give every fringe/extreme idea or person equal time. Instead he has guests on that are already noteworthy and have an audience. I find some of those episodes the most interesting as clearly those guests are saying something that resonates with an audience. I think it is critically important to understand why some 'antisocial' idea is resonating, especially if it is harmful.
Rogan is also great at hearing out a guest, finding common ground, and then discussing differences. Something I try to continually improve upon myself.
I'm in no way advocating some kind of 'equal time' type argument for all sides of an issue, but I think it is important that we address ideas that have a significant number of proponents rather than ignore them. Remember that both the women's rights and civil right's movements were initially considered antisocial and selfish.
Important distinction: This is not about weakness and avoiding harm to the self. It's about caring for and preventing harm to the society we live in.
Relevantly, framing things with a language of personal weakness (both "this thing I want you to stop doing is weakness" and also "this thing I want you to start doing is not weakness") is a common indoctrination tactic for manipulating people. IMO, you should worry about its relation to how you said what you just said and where the idea came from.
When those "different ideas" are flat out lies, malice, greed, and anti-science peddling, then it is something to be _prevented_ not avoided. Because we've learned from centuries of directly observing how regular people respond to them even when those people are strong and capable. Ignoring everything we know from historians about human behavior causes real problems over and over again, so it's probably best not to.
> I personally do not consider all 'sides' of an issue to be equal, and am capable of considering an argument without normalizing it.
Even if this is true, history has shown repeatedly that it's not a sound model for preserving civic wellness.
> I think it is critically important to understand why some 'antisocial' idea is resonating, especially if it is harmful.
We already understand why. Indoctrination works. That case was solved a very very long time ago and there is literally no mystery left. Giving malicious indoctrinators a credible and far reaching platform where the respected host jovially nods along always proves to further their agenda no matter how much we wish it weren't the case. On the other side, we have evidence and research on deplatforming now, and we see that it works.
> Remember that both the women's rights and civil right's movements were initially considered antisocial and selfish.
You should be aware that this subtly invokes any number of informal fallacies: equivocation, relativist fallacy, false equivalence, questionable cause, texas sharpshooter, probably others (that is the problem with the informal ones).
A person who says that women and black people should not have equal rights is the opposite of a pro-social narrator. Trying to represent it as otherwise is bad news.
I very much favor the platforms that allow an open exchange of ideas and allow participants to make up their own mind. I've generally learned much more from those that disagree with me than those that agree.
That's a pleasant idea, but it blatantly ignores the fact proven time and again throughout all of recorded history that all people are easily manipulated and that mass brainwashing is real. People have been writing treatises on this for literally thousands of years.
People also eat up the "you can make up your own mind about what people say" argument. But, what fraction of a percent of people have the time to go out and do their own professional grade research after a controversial guest? What percentage of that can even effectively perform objective research? For me, the whole point of a media platform like that is to do some of that filtering for me or present a balanced view so that I don't get taken by some guy spouting complete BS without getting called out for it.
How does one distinguish a pseudo-intellectual from a real intellectual?
> How does one distinguish a pseudo-intellectual from a real intellectual?
Well, that's certainly not something I'm qualified to answer. However, I was reading "Thinking Fast and Slow" recently and one of the heuristics for identifying if there can be real expertise formed in a subject or not is if it has regularity. IE, you can't have expertise if the outputs of some process are dominated by chance. I'd start there.
The problem is people who use cargo cult science as a selling point for their particular ideas which are usually political in nature or maybe have to do with startups or the stock market. Things that if they were a truly decided science, we wouldn't be arguing over in the first place. They take bad results with tiny sample sizes and pawn them off as fact and then because "facts don't care about your feelings" they feel justified calling anybody that doesn't believe in whatever it is they're selling an idiot.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kv9qd/the-joe-rogan-expe...
You've just described mainstream media nowadays.
Do you have any credible examples?
This isn't just him flirting with the alt-right and intellectual darkweb anymore. He's out here repeating lies about left-wing activists starting fires at the same time there are actual right-wing militias setting up paramilitary checkpoints.
This has gone from Joe saying stupid stuff to Joe spewing dangerous rhetoric that may get people killed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/16/oregon-fires... https://www.newsweek.com/half-million-people-evacuated-orego...
Secondly on the political issues, at the very least his enabling of Alex Jones is irresponsible. He's giving a complete lunatic who does nothing but spread conspiracy theories an uncritical platform. This isn't even a matter of ordinary politics any more, platforming someone who calls the victims of a school shooting crisis actors is reprehensible. Not really sure how anyone who has some sense of morality wants to enable that. I fully understand tech workers who want to put a stop to it rather than enabling it for financial gain.
This is honestly the first time in my life where basic decency, honesty and factuality are politicised.
Also, the article explicitly mentions that this is a breach of contract, so there's very little chance this actually happens. Just more political noise from the same type of people that always generate political noise.