The age of the grift shift
tante.cc
tante.cc
to make money it helps to insert yourself between people and something they may want or need. this is how pretty much every business works.
social media made it possible for anyone(?) to gain a following and so put themselves as a kind of authoritative middle man and act as a conduit for advertisers between people and thing they want
> "It was no longer about the actual qualities of the medium, not about videos or music or stories or essays etc. Everything one made was just content."
and the grift part came from the idea that the substance of the product itself doesn't matter as much as just getting yourself in the middle. getting a monopoly on eyeballs that are interested in the thing
a good example is those youtube farms that churn out history and economics videos where the presenter doesn't even know what he's saying, just reading words all day. content
at the end they are all selling the same thing, the idea of some happiness or entertainment
Off the top of my head: There was recently a fairly famous instance of an academic at Harvard who was suspended for falsifying data.
I guess the question becomes how do recognize grift or deception unless you establish people like the academics who exposed people like Gino. Do we just need more of that?
If I were to modify your initial statement to indicate the involvement of a group of reasonably intelligent attorneys, would that possess the same level of persuasiveness for you?
It’s similarly persuasive to me no matter which group you use in your original statement (attorneys or academics). Which is to say - not very.
It would, but that's because I am assuming that physical, natural or societal constraints are likely to bound behavior and so deviation from ethical norms despite any number of agents acting purely on self-interest, regardless of their group. You can't grift someone to believe you created improved semiconductor node technology because of the physical constraints of the universe, or you can't grift someone to believe that gun ownership will inherently lead to violence because of decades of data that proves otherwise, or you can't grift someone to believe that X drug will cause X effect it doesn't because of natural constraints imposed by the body.
My point is that grifting has its limits, and reasonable self-interested agents understand they operate under the constraints of those limits regardless of their group membership. So the question I was trying to ask was what is that people are hoping to achieve in the long-term by associating with a particular grift after they've made a quick buck and the thing in exposed as a lie. So as someone said the nature of the grift has to keep changing. I guess I can reason about the behavior of people who hang on (like people who work in MetaGov) as possibly people who are dreamers or hopefuls, or maybe have sunk costs.
Even portraying oneself as an 'expert' in a domain despite having limited expertise can be considered a form of grifting: It is, in fact, the focus of the article's opening paragraph.
To draw a more specific connection to the present example, even if Metagov were to falter and fail entirely for whatever reason, these academics now have the opportunity to assert their involvement in a 'groundbreaking web3 governance model.' Consequently, they are likely to generate a substantial volume of academic papers stemming from this involvement, a key metric used to evaluate academics. There is certainly motive for academic grifters to be involved.
Particularly considering the historical context of web3, there are many valid reasons to suspect that certain individuals with grifting tendencies might be engaged in such a project.
I think academics have a weird susceptibly to grifting because they feel morally reassured that other people should listen to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine
Choice quotes:
> a medical researcher at the University of Texas, found that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical cancer studies had replications that could confirm conclusions from the original studies
> A survey of cancer researchers found that half of them had been unable to reproduce a published result
> A 2016 survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment results (including 87% of chemists, 77% of biologists, 69% of physicists and engineers, 67% of medical researchers, 64% of earth and environmental scientists, and 62% of all others
How many of those papers were retracted, you think?
It's actually not at all hard to 'turn down' the decision to simply start defrauding people on an industrial scale.
Meanwhile, Central Banks all around the world are rolling blockchain-based systems to use as the future infrastructure of all their transactions, bypassing external middlemen like Visa and Mastercard. There is real tech coming from web3 and P2P computing will take over cloud computing sooner or later.
https://cryptoslate.com/brazil-to-launch-cbdc-drex-in-2024-s...
It's like how libertarians are constantly surprised in the rare instances that they get what they supposedly want that it turns out they didn't want it at all, but rather their idealized version.
Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"". Which is why it does end up being centralized, just around the management of a handful of resource collectives.
> Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"".
Let the cryptobros be wrong. Decentralized computing isn't about crypto, it is about reusing idle resource to create something bigger than big tech. BitTorrent is real, fediverse is real, IPFS...
"I am good at numbers, money is just numbers" https://xkcd.com/1570/
I have a lot of examples, including myself, of people reading a financial thing very badly wrong.
Sometimes it's a little thing, switching digits as you read £2.49 becoming £4.29.
Sometimes it's medium-sized mistakes like not understanding compound interest.
Sometimes it's big things like someone mistaking an example interest rate for a guarantee and getting a loan they can't afford to repay, or in the other direction assuming the high dividend rate on their share holdings will last forever and has no risk of becoming worthless.
Sometimes it's catastrophic things like a large cohort of people who ought to know better all reading the paper that just won the Nobel prize for economics, not realising that it doesn't work so well if all the risks are correlated with each other, and systematically mis-pricing the assets they sell to each other causing a major global crisis when too many bad debts get called in at the same time.
If my bank goes under, my government guarantees the return of my money — up to a certain threshold, but that guarantee is much more than the "lol" you get if your DIY "bank" lets out all the magic smoke.
well done, you just did it again.
> Sometimes it's catastrophic things like a large cohort of people who ought to know better all reading the paper that just won the Nobel prize for economics
What a great way to defend the status quo as if every possible alternative is naive, a scam or faded to fail. The despair of a conformist that thinks everything is too big to fail or impossible to go against.
That's not even close to what I was saying and I have no idea how you've misapprehended me so badly.
I will however offer this aphorism:
Who is the bigger fool, the one who messes up, or the one who upon seeing the first one fail says "what an idiot, this is easy, I will do it myself"?
> “Wait, wait, wait, but why are we doing it this way?” Barroso said on the podcast. “And it just turns out that the people who had been living in that area hadn't really thought about questioning that. And sometimes it's something that was based on a good reason three years ago, and that reason had a sell-by date, and it's time to do something else.”
Good thing for the world, guys with the mindset like you doesn't prevent guys like Barroso great work.
"Luiz André Barroso had never designed a data center before Google asked him to do it in the early 2000s. By the time he finished his first, he had overturned many conventions of the computing industry, laying the foundations for Silicon Valley’s development of cloud computing."
You're reading non-existent intent between the lines.
Look at what I quoted in my original comment:
> At some point it becomes so easy that people start to wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit.
Criticising this point doesn't require me to deny the possibility that smart people can't come up with new things; to use your own example here, I'm saying normal people won't run their own cloud computing infrastructure.
Not even because it immediately stops being "the cloud" if they did — most people don't have the time nor inclination to understand RAID numbers, let alone cron jobs or keeping TLS libraries up to date.
Can you name the equivalent of those in finance? I can't, but I have tried reading the T&Cs of bank accounts so I do recognise the patterns that tell me they exist.
That's what we pay the middleman for, and why we still would even if there was a cryptocurrency that actually did what it's biggest fans all say it does.
I call this "Knocking down Chesterton's fence to be gored by a bull moments later"
I would rather have fast and cheap online payments than a chat bot I have to twist around until I can talk to customer service.
but proof of work / crypto isn't fast, and nothing makes it particularly cheap.
If we are talking fast and cheap online payments, micropayments instead of subscriptions, let's go. Too much of crypto is a solution looking for a problem (and finding ones that don't fit).
PoW only addresses a single problematic aspect of this stuff (and only reduces it, doesn't actually resolve it). It does nothing about all the other problematic aspects.
Sure, but we had that with SETI@home, and then Folding@home, and they were doing something useful with their work rather than just finding which random numbers hashed a certain way in order to get a token whose primary economic value was the assumption that "remove trust" is a useful thing in economics.
We also had a blockchain of sorts before bitcoin, and still regularly use it: it's called "git".
And we already have fast and cheap online payments. In my case this was initially in the form of paypal, then my banks got good at it more directly; in Kenya since 2005, and now more countries in the region, there's a thing called M-PESA which does much the same but works with pre-feature-phones: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M-Pesa_on_Nokia_1100...
I mean.. it’s a site associated with a notable VC organization.
They aren't selling anything. They are simply feeding idle brains with content in exchange for shotgunning topics for ad revenue.
Today it is clear that these are businesses that are there to make profit, and the "content" is only there to spread the advertisements apart.
I was catching-up to the Coffeezilla's videos, and it looks like the scammers-be-scamming. And some people will try their 'luck' with anything fringe-y (forex, NFTs, crypto, AI, etc.)
Even though there is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of grifters and rentiers, it's unreasonable to say that "this is how pretty much every business works".
If you buy a car the mfr is hardly inserting themselves between something you could have without them. Same for a haircut, a restaurant, or the food the restaurant used, for that matter.
There is even a small segment of the banking industry that does more than just insert itself and charge a toll!
I just meant that they see a costly thing that people do, and they do something to reduce that cost. That basically is what all companies do.
I believe that's what GP meant as well, but apparently everyone else interpreted it differently.
No one in their right mind would want to walk to any business in the US due to its urban planning and transport infrastructure.
Even biking is an absurd risk that only rare people dare to make.
In the US it's not abnormal to express the length of even mundane car trips in how many hours you spend driving. That's definitely not a halmark of a walkable region.
> Even biking is an absurd risk that only rare people dare to make.
Neither of these things are true everywhere in the US. There are many cities where walking and biking are common forms of transportation. But there are certainly many places where the infrastructure appears to be actively designed to kill pedestrians and bicyclist as well.
I'm really tired of people acting like it's just a free market where everyone is an equal, rational actor. There was a concerted effort to redesign Americana around cars that was not replicated globally, and you see the consequences of it play out in real time.
It's never been a free market. There was no golden age where everybody had access to public transit. There were zero public services at all, you were on your own. And often had to contend with bandits and worse.
I'm really tired of people acting like the only thing standing in the way of utopia, is capitalism.
I think you're thinking of Skyrim and not the actual world, but there are certainly historical periods that were famously bandit-free even in antiquity like the Mongol Empire.
I know this story and for a long time believed it. But it appears that developers building new towns (urban expansion) in the mid 20th century put in streetcars to get people to move in (connected to city networks etc) and ran them at a loss. As the new town filled up and the developers went on to the next one, the streetcars became the uneconomic responsibility of the town.
Funny enough, this is being repeated in modern times because a lot of transit activists want to force all transit to be free and instead be funded by theoretical rich peoples' taxes.
That's a particularly amusing example to pick considering that dealers are the dominant distribution channel from which to acquire a car, at least in the U.S.
Not unlike how writers/artists created a bunch of value and ClosedAI and similar are grifts built on top of them. except unlike car mfgs authors don't have much pull to stop it
Some of those employees jumped ship to the Honda dealer after the Toyota dealer was bought by the guy who owned all the other car dealerships in town. For a long time the Honda dealer was the only competitor to Maguire, but then Maguire bought the Honda dealer.
Those employees don't speak ill of Maguire but they certainly don't speak about in him in glowing terms.
Ford, Honda, Chevrolet-4x
Jeep, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Ram, Subaru-3x
These are many more multiples of Tesla’s sales.
Teslas sales make up a minuscule portion of the market. Tesla cannot sell directly to users in any of the continental US, they must sell through a website and ship the vehicle.
Federal Dealership laws preclude direct to customer sales.
Tesla may be valuable but its effects on the market are negligible.
The other day I purchased some particle board and had them cut it to size. I do not believe that hardware store is on the same level of grift as the companies being described in this article.
>That's a particularly amusing example to pick considering that _dealers_
Fyi... The gp you replied to specifically wrote about manufacturer as the example and not dealers when he wrote: "If you buy a car the _mfr_ is hardly inserting themselves"
They start to, though. What was that about BMW and having telemetry on car radio I heard about the other day? Or attempts by manufacturers to turn pieces of car into services, which has an effect of them inserting themselves into car resales?
i don't mean it in a totally negative sense. maybe it came across that way in the context.
a business is still a facilitator between you and something you need. they have an advantage be it money, resources, technology, connections...something that allows them to act as that middle man and in many case monopolise it.
on social media its much easier for anyone to do that. you dont really need any resource aside from "hustle" as they call it.
Sure this might be true. Also true that changing topic every three months is a sure way to ruin your reputation
That's how bad businesses work. Good businesses provide a solution to a real problem, instead.
> Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution.
I cannot wrap my head around this framing at all. Businesses that provide a solution aren't inserting themselves between anything. They're offering a solution directly.
That's just an incredibly jaded way to look at things. The solution is developed by people who specialize in developing solutions. The communication of the existence of the solution to people who need it is handled by people who specialize in communication and customer outreach, i.e. sales.
You may think that without a sales team the solution would be cheaper; the reality is that without a sales team the solution would either not exist or be substantially less refined as _someone_ has to handle the customer interactions, and if that's the dev than that's taking them away from working on the product.
We view a business as problematic when it's only inserting itself between you and the solution, without actually creating the solution, i.e. rent-seeking. So, it's the relationship between the business and the solution that causes an issue, not the action of putting the business between the solution and the problem. The latter is a given, always.
None of that opinion was conveyed in what you wrote earlier.
I disagree. They’re not the same thing. Most businesses will provide solutions to a need, or at least facilitate getting you to the solution for a fee.
The social media grifters are doing something else. They’re finding people with a need (or tricking people into thinking they have a need) and then trying to capture that person as a follower and, eventually, a revenue stream while delivering little real value in exchange.
The prototypical social media grifter like this has a lot to say and a lot of strongly worded opinions, but the end game usually involves something like hiding the “real” answers inside of a paid course or paid community. They spend years building a following on social media and then suddenly they’re selling a course for $1000 per seat. They only need a few hundred of their million followers to convert to make a decent amount of money. The content is usually so-so or recycled from other books and courses. Often purchasers are so embarrassed about having paid $1000 for it that they won’t complain online. If they do complain, they get dunked on by other social media users who were smart enough to see the grift, so they delete their complaints.
I’ve followed many people on Twitter who started out doing good work on indie projects or small startups, built up a following, and then pivoted into selling courses and educational material to their followers.
An alternative grift is to build up a following and then carefully walk the line on “offering the opportunity” to invest in their newest business. A handful of their star-struck followers will be knocking down their door to hand over their cash. You see it a lot with real estate and self storage business influencers.
Can you provide some examples?
As with Jeff Kramer and other business talking heads who will gladly tell you how you can make money by just following their advice, if somebody really had the secrets to "get rich quick" they wouldn't go around selling that to you.
In the age of "web3" (and now AI) hype, there's no longer one Jeff Kramer - there are thousands, millions of them, inserting themselves in peoples' feeds instead of into their TVs. Now countless grifters are out there, selling themselves as arcane wizards who can lead the gullible masses to financial success.
Unlike Kramer (who is bound by a legal framework that at least tries to protect public from outright grifts in traditional media), though, this new generation is basically free to outright lie with complete impunity.
"Dreams are a wish fulfilled." Freud might have been on to something. Or even his nephew Bernays.
This might be the rentiers scheme, but that's hardly how any economy works.
A bakery hardly inserts itself between the very bread it makes and the client who wants to buy it. Even logistics companies, the epitome of a middleman, delivers critical value.
> social media made it possible for anyone(?) to gain a following and so put themselves as a kind of authoritative middle man and act as a conduit for advertisers between people and thing they want
I don't think this is true. Marketing is not a middleman. Raising awareness of a product and/or service is not the same thing as making impossible deals possible.
Likewise, newspapers from a couple of decades ago were not middlemen in any of the adverts they printed, or is YouTube a middleman in any of the adverts it shoves between videos.
People who can explain complicated stuff, in a digestible manner, are valuable (when they have decent motives). Think most of Asimov's writing. He was famous for his fiction, but his "Science for the Layman" stuff was wonderful.
That said, the same exact skills, can be used to polish turds, and the money is easier.
I’m not saying the grifters haven’t latched on, but I don’t think it’s fair to equate the shift in conversation with a massive grift that everyone’s involved in. The assumption seems to be that “because X was a grift and Y was a grift all things must be a grift.” That’s not a generalizable statement, and grifts only work because they appear in all ways to be like the real thing, but the real thing is actually fairly rare.
In my prior megacorp jobs we were asked to sit down and figure out what to do with crypto, blockchain, web3, etc. We couldn’t come up with a single thing. Our board was convinced we were missing something, but we worked with the other megacorps and no one had a good idea. That’s the sign of a grift. They don’t hold up under scrutiny.
In this latest wave with generative AI we literally can’t keep up with the good ideas, and they actually work. That’s not the sign of a grift. It holds up under scrutiny.
The “anything anyone is excited about is a grift” meme is the song of jaded souls that build their worth on poopooing anything people are interested in. It’s the sullen teens smoking and making fun of the glee club kids. (I was the sullen teen, I know).
This isn’t to say people don’t get carried away, and the grifters really do well on the real thing because reality supports their grift. It doesn’t mean be unmoored and credulous. But it means look a bit closer and don’t do the lazy thing and assume everything is a grift, even if the grifters follow, people are hyperbolic, etc, and all the signs of the prior grifts are manifest.
In biology you'd call that a cancer; in predator-prey dynamics it's the thing that happens at breakneck speed before the inevitable crash. It's so dumb. But talk about degrowth or alternative economic models and you've suddenly conversationally untouchable.
Sustainability is a behavior only learned when absolutely necessary, when the constraints of material existence impose themselves on the living. Growth will always happen outside of these constraints.
That is to say, some behaviors will reduce growth now in exchange for stability (i.e. more growth later, or less growth loss later), but those are hard-won and they are not the default. The default is always growth up to capacity, and we don't actually know what that capacity is.
Malthusians have been dooming for centuries. We can accept that at some future point, they might be right, but it is always wrong to assume they are inevitably correct at the present moment. Growth can and will be pursued until it is no longer an option. It's not weird, it's not a fixation, it's not a hypnosis. It's just life.
Lets instead look at natural/living systems. If you imagine you have a new kind of plant that has no predators and no diseases that affect it, you can imagine it may spread "like a weed". But in any ecosystem you cannot imagine impeded growth will last forever, even if there is plenty of fertile soil to grow in. Animals and insects eventually adapt to feed of the abundant source of energy the plant has created. Illness and disease spread in monocultures.
There are 8 billion people on the planet. The handful of VCs could be perfect angels and it would be just a drop in the ocean compared to the number of people that are not VCs and will not ever have massive amounts of money, yet want more and realize they may be able to get it if they grift off the ecosystem.
I was in a strong anti-establishment, anti-capitalist phase, but I really respected this professor and the material he taught, because I felt like I was empowered by the material.
One day after class, I waited for 30 mins in a line to ask him how X% GDP growth etc. year-over-year was a sustainable goal. Being a young man with a lot of testosterone, I phrased it in a really edgy way, something like "Wouldn't you call something that grows forever a cancer?"
His response was that he had a strong belief that economic growth could reflect the growth and implementation of ideas, of new technologies and efforts that globally improve life. I don't remember it super well, but I do recall that he was emphasizing that while the curve had a material impact on people's lives, it would not necessarily require consumption of scarce resources or other damaging, difficult-to-reverse decisions that caused harm. (We were mostly using oil extraction as an example of a finite resource that had a tight relationship with economic growth.)
I liked his answer, but I didn't feel it was very likely. Decades later, I still think this mindset is damaging, but having volunteered a lot more in the public sphere, I can see how a lack of growth also causes huge problems.
The problem is that most economists do not actually have a good “grounded” model of productivity and growth — they are lost in their own abstractions (GDP and what not).
The pernicious side effects of growth are symptomatic of the underlying problem which is market failure — and despite pockets of work (Eg. Stiglitz, etc) economics as a whole is not yet emotionally ready to wake up to the situation.
On the one side, there are masses of people who need to work, but the economy does not really have useful things for them to do. The basics are handled by a small number of people running combines in Iowa. If there's a steel mill, it's overseen by one guy who pushes a button.
On the other side, there are stockpiles of capital that are looking for a place to sit. That want desperately to outpace inflation.
In the middle, you have people who can create convincing-looking Potemkin companies. On the one hand, they provide employment to the many people who need it. On the other, they create investment opportunities for the people with the money.
The ideas are generally hare-brained, but like options contracts they have theta -- "maybe it'll work in the future?" -- so you can (a) sell shares/contracts without intrinsic value, and (b) keep rolling your contracts/grifts forward, "extend and pretend" style. It's all about hope that never materializes.
It's frustrating to me how frantically people work, and how useless the activity is, particularly when there are serious problems happening at the same time (global warming, housing crisis). Yet for some reason (to do with money), people can't work on their problems directly. For an individual, the solution to the housing crisis isn't to go out and build a house; it's to join a venture-backed startup that can convince SoftBank to give you enough money to convince the one remaining 50-year-old contractor to build you a house. Before long, all the activity is in those VC-backed startups, and none of the problems are getting solved at all.
And then the people will rebel. They will put us with our laptops together with the other instigators en mass in train wagons and send us into ovens and burn pits like cattle. "The market wills it" will be written as a welcoming slogan above the end-station.
There will be adds everywhere, colorful and shrill, until the place were it all ends- which will be dark and quiet. And maybe, just maybe we had it coming, but also no way to avoid it.
So i call shotgun on the last wagon.
I know Hyperbole, ludicrous, yadayadaya, but maybe talk to someone not in tech. Behind the service smile, they really hate our guts for the dependencies and shit we forced upon them.
Is this a book quote that I can't google?
Absolutely. It's just sheer luck I stumbled into this career because I found like programming and designing systems, and I happen to be pretty good at it, and it just so happens to pay damn well, especially to a guy from a lower middle class background. The unavoidable complexity foisted upon the masses by the techno-aristocracy that they are ill-equipped to navigate is staggering. I don't blame them for hating us.
I wonder where they went. Are they busy crying about being scammed by the child prodigy/most popular effective altruist in the world, or do they not care because they had a finger in the pie?
Or perhaps they moved on to shill AI and its glorious wonders?
That's R. U. Sirius, nom de plume for Ken Goffman. Before Mondo 2k, he published High Frontiers, too.
True, the manifesto was in 1909
When we're talking about algorithmic ranking of content the term content probably arose from the SEO era of the 2000's when the mantra "content is king" took off (it was coined by Bill Gates in the 90's).
https://medium.com/@HeathEvans/content-is-king-essay-by-bill...
I've certainly experienced this all around me. Perfectly boring people who have nothing to do with media production will reference the stuff they're watching on YouTube or finding on Instagram as "content", even when it's just their cousin's photos of themselves taking selfies on a beach in Hawaii with an acai bowl. This to me is "establishing" a trend, not inventing it.
Personally, I really dislike this trend. I especially find the term "consume content" to be... gross, actually. Like a pig at a trough. But I'm not sure how common my experience is.
People have been building content businesses for well over 20 years. 50 if you don't think that, eg, NBC execs had a deep focus on the qualities of a cat loving alien (Alf debuted today, 37 years ago).
If he'd had something interesting to say, it could be that content recommendation systems driving what people see has some downsides. But that ain't new; we've been talking about that for a long time too. And youtube certainly didn't invent that problem. Also, you could cover that in one paragraph instead of dragging it out over 10.
(Content recommendation has upsides too: I never would have found Kenji Lopez Alt or Chef John's cooking videos; or modindustrial's general making videos; or AvE's hilarious teardown videos; or alvin zhou's amazing slow cooking channel; or CrimePaysButBotanyDoesnt; etc w/o content recommendation.)
I think the scale of it was what concerned me before, because formerly we all had a small handful of MLM-adjacent people in our acquaintances, but then social media and later the various manias and bubbles seemed to crank that up to 11 and suddenly it seemed like they were everywhere.
I know it's not true, and those people/accounts just seem more prevalent because it's by their nature they need to be highly visible, but that wasn't quite enough.
Now though? Now I can dismiss large numbers as potentially being bots.
It's not particularly healthy to commit too hard to this as a coping mechanism, as of course some small number of people with what seem at first like shallow, self-interested opinions are going to be onto something genuinely interesting and I might be missing that.
But 100 crypto influencers now becomes a handful, leveraging technology, and that becomes easier to swallow.
It works for other things too. The cluster of comments on every show hacker news post for open source (but somehow commercially restricted) software claiming it's not open if it's not MIT? Automated cloud provider community sentiment management accounts.
The linkedin blogspam PR houses communicating exclusively with other linkedin blogspam PR houses? All automatic now, no suffering humans in that loop.
It's a nicer picture overall. Can more easily justify skipping over well-structured bad ideas as if they were spam comments on blogs back in the early 2010s.
No no, we're just zealots easily worked up.
<Context> ... </Context>
Write a short, one paragraph argument in the style of a hackernews commenter which might help to steer the conversation.
Examples might be:
- quick quips that equate large technology companies with startups
- responses that frame the argument morally in a manner which suggests that donating software to managed cloud providers to productize is the right thing to do
;)
Edit: Some content is pure entertainment and this doesn't fit this view.
I think that when people started unironically calling it "content", that was the writing on the wall that we're going down a bad path.
At the end of the day the company continues to make money off it's core activities. Whilst the Rats talk-the-talk in an attempt to climb the ladder and win the Rat Race.
Humans are fickle and will do whatever to chase a buck. Nothing new there. You can day-trade the latest trend and sure you might make a buck - but typically the social, repetitional, and personal cost isn’t worth it.
I think what is new is that people are now realizing that it is so widespread across many institutions thanks to the internet. The trick is to not let yourself get caught up in brutally short hypecycles and to not get used by people who are – including the VCs.
Slow is smooth is fast. Chase the multiplier, not the moment.
The points made about LTT, YouTube, etc. seemed to be wholly unrelated to the premise of the subject, and basically just padded out what could have been a few sentences talking about the ridiculous nature of tech fads, into many paragraphs chiding a "shift" in language, while reenforcing its proliferation by adopting it. The legitimacy we give YouTube for example, is only as much as we are willing to give it; I don't care what YouTube calls Poetry, Music, and Documentaries - YouTube is not the arbiter of language and my contempt and disgust for their attempt at homogonous phrasing is something I actively avoid. I agree with the writer entirely that the terms YouTube uses are gross. The answer then, is to not use them, and entirely discount the premise of smushing together thousands of years worth of various mediums and art forms into one heaving blob of mediocrity - I hate that idea, and I despise YouTube for attempting to do precisely that. It's illegitimate, so I don't use the terms they insist upon.
It seems like myself and the author agree more than not, I guess I just don't understand what he was attempting to convey in that agreement. That it's annoying to hear people who shilled NFTs talk about AI now? I suppose that it's kind of annoying, I guess? I usually refer to those people as either: Early Adopters, or Trend Chasers. The former being a bit more forgiving, the latter a bit more cynical. I think that referring to such people as "grifters" is a poor choice because it carries a weight of intended maliciousness for profit, where one might not be. People like trends. People like talking about trendy things. People like interacting with other people who also like trendy things. I don't think it's fair or reasonable to presume them to be nefarious by default. They're just living their lives, doing their thing. When people talk about things I don't like, I either keep on moving, or mute/block/silence their posts. It need not be any deeper than that.
(Their other posts are about Bitcoin, web3, meta verse etc.)
Patreon is a way for people to be paid using mainstream payment systems for what they write (or create in whatever other way). It has nothing particular to do with Bitcoin, web3, the metaverse, or any of these other grifts.
If the irony of the author writing that piece and then slapping a patreon link at the end is lost on you then I probably can’t do much in trying to explain it further
Because you work in tech and are thus surrounded by many people of which the very personality is to seek and appreciate novelty.
I don't see drift, which implies greed and manufactured sincerity. I see curiosity, enthusiasm and creativity.
Much longer than "a few years ago" I recall that, when Google was still allowing "ads for domains", it was common to see "websites" that had no content, only ads disguised as "search results". This led to discussions around the value of "content".
According to a recent interview with one of its founders YouTube, the idea for it, actually began as a "HotOrNot" clone that would use video. It soon pivoted to amateur entertainment.
Innovation will happen in that gap in the absence of progress in the actual tech space.
The innovation that has to happen with AI is in UX. We have to have interfaces that will for example, allow a lay person to declaratively build software in natural language. Think VB6 powered by GPT-4.
Until every new AI product stops linking to Google Collab or a discord bot, the tech won’t break out. It will remain a nerdtoy and the grifters will own the day.
Newspapers are a little but better in that in times of big news, they will expand. But on the slowest of news days the NYT will still publish enough articles to space out their advertising.
Both of these things had a special appeal to the indolent and ignorant for reasons that were overlapping but also different, the "grinds" are going to take over in AI and if Web3 ever makes a resurgence (there's something appealing to me about distributed authentication though we've had Client SSL certificates for years and nobody cares) it will be because the grifters are gone and the grinds have ground on it. I don't know if there's going to be another thing in that series.
I think this is dead-wrong. If there are people watching this content, then it IS interesting to them. Most people out there who create content - replace this word with any other you prefer - want to monetize it, so they can make a living out of it. There is no difference between old and new media in this sense, even though the author implies there was some golden age in the past where this was not the case.
Having the possibility of more people making a living out of it through technology has actually enabled us to enjoy more content we care about, not less, although certainly there is a lot of noise out there (scam artists, etc.).
The difference that makes the current circumstamces rather special is that we have both the powerful tools and the acute need to do better. But we dont
Explaining the increase of grifters descending on AI all of a sudden when the majority of them are ChatGPT wrappers and calling themselves AI companies.
More like a new griftopia has been created.
Time will tell who is swimming naked.
One of his main beefs is that people who don't know or care much about technology suck a lot of oxygen out of the room. Well, sure. Very little to do with capitalism and certainly not specific to tech. Loud people with dumb opinions have opined about important subject in every age. Today, they do the same about politics and finance, too.
And this has nothing to do with the abstraction of content, which he invests with too much power. This has been going on since before the printing press, and the daily grind of content has been very real for well over a century at most newspapers, I can assure new. YouTube did not create it.
His weird take on VCs is typical of people outside tech who don't understand that many investors have long careers as builders, and have contributed more to the industry than their critics. PG and Andreessen come to mind. They don't need consultants to tell them what to think.
Everyone is signaling, because we are a social species, and some things get talked into existence. So what! So-called influencers signal. Tante himself signals his virtues in this bio "De-Evangelist, writer and speaker. Comm(u|o)nist. Feminist. Antifascist. Luddite. He/him." Which, frankly, contains terms that attract a lot of grifters, too.
In some parts overpromising and in others good enough or getting better and will deliver "value" in certain scenarios.
It seems like an easy way to test the hypothesis this article alludes to.
Arguable today everything is advertiser/publisher relations.
On the startup side, venture capitalists encourage startups to fail fast and remove friction aka propping up money-losing economics, so they can have an IPO to wall street stockholders. After which the company must extract rents from its ecosystem and report every quarter to its shareholder class how well it's doing that.
At every level, the system is designed to extract money from the masses of people. Whether it's "I will teach you how to flip a house" in the real estate bubble, to "I will teach you how to do AI stuff". The entire system optimizes for that.
People might say "what, are you advocating communism"? Well, the alternative doesn't have to be that. It can be a universal basic income providing a floor to people, financed by pigovian taxes on fossil fuels (already done in Alaska for decades), plastic pollution, tolls for congestion of roads, etc. While at the same time subsidizing open source software. If the government did these two things, it would massively improve society. As the UBI would grow, we would not have so much need for labor unions, minimum wage laws, etc. to protect workers. People would spend time with their own families, learn new things, practice their religion, hobbies, etc. And stop having perverse incentives e.g. to avoid reporting some recovery just to keep receiving disability payments. Both sexes would "lean out" instead of "leaning in" to corporate life. They'd stop sticking their elderly parents in nursing homes and their kids in government schools for long hours a day just so they can work long hours without vacation.
Instead we have this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8
Hello talk radio and 24-hour news networks.
The future is so obvious, bright, and crystal clear with that tech, no one can bottle that genie. As intended.
All you have to do is to look a tad further than your primeval need to belong to a group (of haters).
Anyways, thank you for a huge foot ahead in that race.
I don’t care about the US dollar at all. It’s boring. The only reason I want them is to buy stuff.
Show me something that will make me want crypto if I don’t care about crypto. (Other than gambling on crypto.)
Think how when nuclear fission was discovered and first made into terrifying destructive weapon and over a decade later into something useful and more practical like power plants.
The tech behind it is what excites me, and that is still in its infancy and not going anywhere, by its very design. The possibilities are endless with it and yes even the thing that excites you will be on there… eventually.
Applications will come, no doubt. When normie users are onboarded transparently it will be a game changer.
We still have ways to go and a lot to build and think about but the future is bright, regardless of what any country thinks or decides to do regulation wise.
And the article bears that out. It's not saying anything new. Yes, "content" is a category, of which there are many subcategories, each with their own stars and losers, processes and histories. So what? It still all needs compressing and caching and firing across the internet in a similar way, hence content.
And yes, there are hangers-on to the latest fad, just as there always were. That long-predates anything we know as capitalism. It's the iron laws of fashion and ideology that are at play. Once we told young men that the best thing ever is to go and die in a field somewhere for a king they'd never met, and a lot of them did that. Once we told people that other classes are all that stands between them and a wonderful life, and they slaughtered those other classes, and then they starved because the other classes thing was a lie. Now we tell people that AI is worth working on. I'll take the capitalism version of that over the others any day.
As such, calling out left- or right-wing extremists from a position that has become itself ideologically extremist is bringing nothing new to the political discourse.
Perhaps the only purity to be found is in the ignorant, the innocent, the children?
But me wanting for us to resume the (even extended) family as a solution to that problem would get me branded almost on the spot as at least right-wing adjacent by what now stands for “centrists”, because “family values” as a whole are now associated to right-wing-ism.
I could give at least two, three other examples (probably more) of stuff that I believe in which would probably get me branded as left-wing, stuff that used to be the domain of common sense, of the political center, until a few decades ago even in the West (for example affordable housing for all is being more and more associated with being left-wing, that wasn’t always the case).
...Actually, I think there is another force at work here: many of the people who consider themselves "centrists" in the US are the same who considered themselves such 20, 30, even 40 years ago. But
a) with the aforementioned moving of the Overton window, they are having to suppress increasing amounts of cognitive dissonance to continue to self-identify as centrists without recognizing that they are now well to the right of where they would have been previously, and
b) with the (slightly paradoxical, only possible due to the increased polarization) simultaneous increase in awareness of the marginalization of various groups, and acknowledgment that it is neither good nor neutral to continue that marginalization, anyone advocating for either maintaining the status quo or returning to some prior state has to either openly state that they want to continue the oppression of these groups, or, again, suppress the cognitive dissonance in any of various ways.
In the end, I think it's really just a long-winded way of restating the Desmond Tutu quote: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
Can you give an example? I can think of plenty of thing where things have moved very far to the left in the US.
Additionally, I did specifically mention that, at the same time as this has been going on, a second movement has been underway that counterbalances it to some extent, and that this is resulting in unprecedented(?) levels of political polarization.
But it's not DBA and network engineers calling it that, it's "everyone".
It rubs me the wrong way the same way gamers suddenly using the word "franchise" did. "oh yeah, this obviously sucks and makes it a worse game, but I can understand why they would want that for their franchise".
People who upload videos to youtube. That is what they do. And no, they don't need it. They could say "video". Easily.
Also, I did put "everyone" in quotes for reason. Slice it how you want, a lot more people than those actually managing a "container" something else could be "content" in use that word. That was a shift that happened. And it's one thing when HR thinks of humans as resources, quite another when humans start referring to themselves that way.
You could say this about anything. When did loads of people start saying "shift" instead of "change"? Or "space" instead of "garden" or "room" or "atrium"? Saying something changed doesn't give it much significance.
> When did loads of people start saying "shift" instead of "change"?
I'd say "shift" is a subset of "change" and slightly more specific (every shift is a change, not every change is a shift). People didn't change how they speak, some adopted the language of website operators, and then even more people started to parrot that unthinkingly.
No one's saying it's because they have to say it (who has to say anything?). There was a criticism of Wordpress being a CMS, and I was referring to that.
> People didn't change how they speak, some adopted the language of website operators, and then even more people started to parrot that unthinkingly.
I don't understand how people didn't change how they spoke if they adopted some language. What's the difference?
What do you think "late stage capitalism" means exactly? Because it sounds like you are describing a situation that fits the definition but saying it doesn't exist...
So "late stage capitalism" means - or at least implies - that it's the form capitalism takes before capitalism finally ends. It shouldn't be used for a form that capitalism repeatedly cycles into and out of.
If you wanted to use a different term to describe this phase - "monopolistic phase capitalism" or something - then that would be fine. "Late stage", though, gives an illusion of linear movement through a definite time period, which historically has proven to be an incorrect view.
I would agree, though, that there are sharper terms to describe the current flavor of capitalism.
That's not how terms work. Maybe you don't like the phrase but it has a meaning, you can't just decide a commonly used term means something else and then debate that strawman.
> If you wanted to use a different term to describe this phase - "monopolistic phase capitalism" or something
Who is the "you" here? My grandfather was a mere lad when this term was coined.
And, we're not at an academic conference that studies such things. We're on HN, where most of the people don't have a precise definition of the term in mind when they read stuff like this. So the misleading connotation matters, at least in this setting.
For example, one of the major problems we are experiencing now is with what has come to be known as Financialization. This enables financiers to generate large income streams without accompanying increases in productivity. There is a body of knowledge about how this works that includes robust and proven regulatory measures for limiting and controlling Financialization.
In a society where we can vote, organize other voters, and even run for office the term "late stage capitalism" is intended to advance an passive agenda. Instead of taking responsibility for how our society functions or fails we can lie back and console ourselves that this was merely the way of things. We aren't having economic problems because we have failed to manage economic systems that we control, but because economies are naturally and inevitably drawn to failure. It is a way of giving up despite knowing the way out.
And it's beside the point, if I didn't like the term Financialization, I couldn't just announce Financialization doesn't exist; it most certainly exists. At least I can't do that in good faith.
Some form of capitalism may continue for another millennium. It may not. As we can’t predict the future, we can’t call contemporary capitalism a late stage of anything.
I should also add that basically nothing called “capitalism” today has much to do with capital, and in fact is better labeled corporatism, financialization, and consumerism, but that’s another discussion.
I was feeling much the same, but you've just made me realise how similar this is to "the dawning of the new age of Aquarius".
And instead of feudalist manors and city-states, it's feudalist gentries of tech companies that can exert their control technologically rather than with state-sanctiondd violence.
Also sadly, the type of system where state actors work with high capital to exert control is also simply just fascism.
It's much more similar to the robber-baron era, at least in the US, except with even less real power. Robber barons could, if pressed, get men with guns or ax handles to beat and kill strikers. I don't think a tech company can do the same today.
Tech companies do not have the power of high, middle or low justice, and are without the ability to effect corporal punishment.
And they still didn't come close to the power of feudal lords.
That said, I actually think it's great that people are taking advantage of this stuff to make money and better their lives -- more power to them! -- but objectively, it's still just content, while the cream always rises to the top.
Never bet against the Macho Man!
I suspect the people you're referencing are simply a cut above, believe in their work, and are excellent at it.
I'd also suspect that the amount of people who produce similar material that you DON'T follow is disproportionate to the ones that you do.
Many people view content creation as a means to an end, which is almost always MLM-adjacent and a mixture of:
* Monetizing views
* Directly selling a product / subscription
* A brand-building exercise to eventually attract sponsored advertising
None of that is evil or immoral -- it's actually fantastic for people who would have never had the opportunity to do this in the past, and can be very directly impactful to their livelihoods in a positive way.
The inescapable byproduct of these activities though is the staggering amount of "content" that gets created, not in the authentic spirit of "I have a valuable perspective on a topic" or "I -need- to put this out in the world", but rather "this is a viable way to generate money" (sometimes as an alternative to working a dead-end job).
That said, the average monthly take on OnlyFans is only ~$150; the top 1% of accounts make 33% of the revenue paid out. [1][2]
There are 158 million songs on DSPs (Spotify et al), 24% of which have literally never been streamed a single time ever. 42% have been streamed less than 10 times total. [3]
67 million songs that nobody has ever heard before! That's a lot of pepperoni, man.
This label "content" even applies to highly-quality, professional creations, as articulated by Robert Downey Jr. [4]
I do genuinely believe that good, quality stuff will usually break through to the niche audience that its intended for though, while at the same time we remain drowning in the tidal wave of crap that people are generating lol
[1] https://www.amraandelma.com/onlyfans-statistics/
[2] https://earthweb.com/onlyfans-statistics/
[3] https://www.xxlmag.com/38-million-tracks-streaming-services-...
[4] https://variety.com/2023/film/news/robert-downey-jr-dolittle...
Us socialists are always a step ahead of you capitalists.
I'm not a historian, but it seems like one rather nasty form of Capitalism was reined in once before (albeit for a new also-insidious form to creep in some decades later).
I'm also pretty skeptical of the "inequality was better" route. Sure, the rich are richer today – but the poor are infinitely less poor. Being poor in 2023 is a far better situation than being poor in 1880.
I consider it a milder form of, “The Rapture is almost upon us!” Maybe, but you don’t know that.
Making the claim that your particular political opinions constitute some kind of neutral default seems to me to be rather absurd.
I criticized the term for making predictions about the future into an assumption about present reality. We can't call the present time "late stage capitalism" because we don't know what will happen in the future. It's a criticism of fortune-telling, not of a particular political stance.
"Late" is a descriptor of past events, not of future ones. The Late Roman Empire already happened. We are looking back on it. We can't do that with capitalism, because we are still in the midst of it.
People write and do what they care about. If they claim to be neutural - they are not honest with either themselves either audience.
> The term “late stage capitalism” drives me nuts and anyone using it immediately gets flagged as not neutral to me, injecting their own hopes into what should be a dispassionate analysis.
Do you imply that term "late stage capitalism" implies that it's about to end. Do you also believe that "developing economies" will eventually develop the level of the developed ones? Or that you can sink you watch 5 meter under water which says 5m water resistent? These are misleading descriptions which do decsribe reality. It's only our assumptions about nature of the described reality are false as we base on our understanding of words, not subject of description.
What is end stage capitalism working towards? What model already exists that we can use to say, “oh yes, we can see that this thing is in the end stage of the form now.”
Nothing, because it’s not an accurate description, it’s a political opinion pushed on to reality. “I want X, so obviously reality is proceeding in a way to make X happen.”
Developing economies in relation to developed is same as I'm in relation to billionaire. Technically you may say that I'm becoming billionaire, but chances are very very slim and only under curtain circumstances I could become one. That's what I mean by misleadingness of the term.
> What is end stage capitalism working towards?
Direction is not implied. It's a description of state of capitalism under domination of multinational corporations, consumerism, increasing commodification of life (seems to be the part author had in mind), growing inequality. And it was described in 1902.
Speaking of direction everything has an end, and this form of capitalism will end. It won't end by ending capitalism (though this scenario is possible with nuclear winter thingy). Capitalism as a driving factor of organisation strong thing to abandon or to replace it.
People who use this term rather show their despise to the dark side of the system.
My complaint was merely that the term "late capitalism" implies that we are in a late stage of a process, that it will be surpassed soon, and that something new will come after. That's how the term is used, in the article posted and in general.
Direction is not implied. It's a description of state of capitalism under domination of multinational corporations, consumerism, increasing commodification of life (seems to be the part author had in mind), growing inequality. And it was described in 1902.
The term is not used to refer to the entire 20th century. It's used to refer to a more recent era.
I don't think much of Marxist class-apocalypse narratives because we've been here before and the correct answer was negotiated settlement rather than feudalism, fascism, or socialism. Roosevelts, not Hitlers or Stalins. We've figured it out before, we can figure it out again. The only thing to fear is fear itself.
Denying the existence of the argument or the problem that inspired it is just silly, though.
Effectively, it’s the same as losing a game and saying “I didn’t want to be a winner anyway because the winners are terrible and cheat.” Pretty childish, right? That said, it does make losing feel a bit better.
You might not like the term "late-stage capitalism", but it is a term in common use today, and describes a real phenomenon. The simplest way I know of to summarize it is that it's what happens when a significant percentage of businesses cross the line from "we make a product/provide a service, and if we do it well we make a good profit" to "we are here to make money as fast as possible by whatever means necessary; if we have to make a product/provide a service to do that, that's a necessary evil".
Additionally, calling it "late-stage" doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to go away; it just means that it's a different stage of capitalism (which seems clear from observation), and that it came after (ie, later than) the more classical capitalism.