Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
Why should non-creatives go along with this?
Attempts to use central planning instead have been universally disastrous
Nobody mentioned central planning except you.
If you control the market, and have a direct way of influencing what the law considers the market, that is by definition not a competitive (and/or mostly free) market.
The name for this scenario is known as "Hobson's Choice"[0].
Also, the word for a market where you have only a couple of buyers (all colluding with each other) is called a monopsony.
We shouldn't. Art has historically been vastly overvalued and I like that its perceived/demanded value has been sharply declining over the past several decades and especially now with the advent of "AI".
I'm sorry if anyone reading this is an artist and I just twisted your pantaloons, but artists don't serve any valuable role in society. Artists exist strictly because society can afford to waste surplus time and resources on frivolous occupations, art is an intangible luxury.
No.
When push comes to shove and society can't afford luxuries for one reason or another, they are among the first things thrown out for a greater (valuable) cause with no tangible losses sustained.
In point of fact, artisans and musicians were considered a fairly lower class as a mere trade within the medieval time period outside of a few rockstars such as Beethoven and Liszt (later in the 18th and 19th centuries).
Edit: Found it. The Principles of Art by Robin George Collingwood
- John Adams, 2nd US President
I assume then that you don't listen to any music, don't watch TV or movies, don't read any books, don't have any pictures on your walls, live in a concrete box with no artistic design applied, and so on? In other words, that you get no value from art in any form?
No value I could not do without, no.
Art is a luxury, it's not strictly necessary for living. As such, the real inherent value of art will always be extremely low.
You're quibbling. If you aren't doing without it, then it has value.
> Art is a luxury, it's not strictly necessary for living.
Neither is the conversation we're having now, nor the medium in which we are having it. Yet I don't think anyone would say the Internet, or even this website, has no value.
The vast majority of the wealth currently on this planet is "not strictly necessary for living". But "living" is more than just bare subsistence. People value quality of life, and art is a major contribution to many people's quality of life. That's why people are willing to pay significant amounts of money for it.
I never said there is no value, I'm saying art has low value (and thus no value I couldn't do without) compared to actually tangible, important things and that it has been overvalued to an extreme until recent decades when more supply (more artists) and better efficiency (digital technologies, "AI") finally started to slash perceived value.
>Neither is the conversation we're having now, nor the medium in which we are having it. Yet I don't think anyone would say the Internet, or even this website, has no value.
Plenty of people think the internet as it exists today is actually a net negative for humanity, let alone low value. While I don't agree to that extent, I do agree with a general notion that the internet is overvalued. Though not quite to what art has been, since the internet is still a communication tool with practical purposes.
You said "artists don't serve any valuable role in society".
> Plenty of people think the internet as it exists today is actually a net negative for humanity
I've never seen anyone say that. To me it's obviously false; the Internet has enabled huge wealth creation.
Just because artists don't serve any valuable role doesn't mean they have no value. A cheap keyboard or a free piece of software isn't valuable, but they nonetheless have some value.
>I've never seen anyone say that. To me it's obviously false; the Internet has enabled huge wealth creation.
Most of the sentiment is based around the ever increasingly "cable TV" nature of the internet as well as the scientifically demonstrated negative effects of social media.
I find your use of language here very confusing.
> the ever increasingly "cable TV" nature of the internet
But you don't have to use those particular Internet channels in order to use the Internet. The Internet carries lots of other traffic. One of the nice things about the Internet as compared with previous communication media is how easy it is to just ignore what you don't like.
> as well as the scientifically demonstrated negative effects of social media
Those effects have been around as long as humans have, and pandering to the worst instincts of people has always been a way for cheap grifters to gain money and notoriety. But it only works because people choose to give in to those worst instincts. You can't fix human nature by discarding useful tools because some people misuse them.
"Valuable" as in how most people use the word: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/valuable
>2
>a : having desirable or esteemed characteristics or qualities; valuable friendships
>b : of great use or service; valuable advice
Artists do not provide valuable work, but doesn't mean their work has no value. Not providing valuable work simply means their work is of (very) low value.
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>But you don't have to use those particular Internet channels in order to use the Internet.
There has been a substantial centralization and consolidation of the internet to varying degrees and for better or worse, both on the front and backends. The frontend centralization in particular is not being received well in recent times.
>Those effects have been around as long as humans have, ... You can't fix human nature by discarding useful tools because some people misuse them.
I agree.
I don't know about "most". The very first meaning (1 a) in your reference is "having monetary value", which is how I have been using the word.
> Artists do not provide valuable work...their work is of (very) low value
Maybe not in your subjective judgment (and both of the definitions you cited for "valuable" are subjective), but other people's subjective judgment might differ from yours. Many people pay significant sums of money for the work of artists. Maybe that doesn't make the art "valuable" in your eyes, but it apparently does in theirs.
In any case, if you're going to talk about "society" as a whole, you can't just help yourself to your subjective judgment. The definition I just cited above of "valuable" is objective: people pay money for it. And people do pay money--in many cases significant sums, as I noted above--for art in our society, so I don't think you can say artists "do not provide valuable work" for society as a whole.
Yes, if push comes to shove, people will stop buying art before they will stop buying, say, food, clothing, and shelter. But in such a hypothetical, society is much poorer, so people are forced to focus on bare subsistence. But I don't think anyone would say such a society had a lot of valuable things in it--indeed, it's precisely the fact that such a society doesn't have a lot of valuable things in it that makes it poor. A rich society has many more valuable things in it than just what is needed for bare subsistence; that's what makes it rich. And people generally prefer a rich society to a poor one. Art is one of those valuable things that people in rich societies like to have. Not everyone, but people's tastes differ, and one of the nice things about rich societies is that it's much easier for people to satisfy their particular tastes, even if they're not common.
Yes, people pay money for art (including me), but the pricing has been steadily falling due to increasing supply (more artists) and efficiency (digital technologies). "AI" in particular is likely going to slash the perceived value lower than humanity has ever seen by making the creation of art dramatically more democratic, thereby reflecting the low real value better.
I consume a lot of art just like most other people, and also realize that I probably pay far too much for it all too because art just doesn't serve any of life's needs other than perhaps killing boredom and flaunting social status.
The average price has because the increase in supply (which, as you say, is being dramatically facilitated by digital technologies and will be even more so by AI) drastically increases the variability in quality.
I think your categorical statements don't take into account that large variability.
> art just doesn't serve any of life's needs
I have already explained why I disagree with this. I think your concept of what has value is too narrow. I don't disagree that there is much "art" produced that has little or no value--and I don't spend any money on it. But that doesn't mean I think all art has little or no value. Some works of art--the ones I've spent significant money on--have had a great deal of value for me, and for many other people.
Before the printing press, a poet was valued and valuable; today, the feeling of valuation remains, but instead of each village of 160 looking after their own poets and bards, it's a power-law distribution where Taylor Swift and J. K. Rowling are worth hundreds of millions to billions while the person at the end of the top 100 best-seller lists absolutely needs a second job.
Wherever the supply and demand curves intersect.
Otherwise, society is less efficient in allocating resources.
In this case, it’s postulated the biggest single factor is a monopsony.
The problem with collective bargaining is that it either involves unmanageable transaction costs, or an unmanageable principal-agent problem. Either every single creator has to be directly involved in the bargaining, which can't realistically be done, or the creators have to empower some small subset of them as bargaining agents, which means the rest of the creators get screwed by those agents.
I think one of the reasons so many creatives feel cheated is there's far too much creativity, so the marginal value of more is low. In that situation of overabundance, some other step in the value chain will deliver most of the value, and reap the reward. This feels like exploitation, but it's just the market telling creatives they need to be producing something else.
How does a market determine cultural value. What is the value of a priceless family heirloom? What is the value of human connections? How do you communicate these thoughts without first assuming that markets correctly assign value?
See how easy it is to argue for the other side, that argument is so compelling that communists tend to focus more on robots over workers and keeping wages low than capitalist countries do.
Yet their compensation is very different. It should be obvious to most that what you are paid is nothing about value or efforts or risk.
And good luck surviving off the scraps you get for streaming fees
Have you tried to reach customers these days to promote your art?
The market’s got nothing to do with it. The music industry is a cartel. Look at the profit margins of the big 3 music companies: that’s a lowball on what the market says the art is worth, but it’s not making it back to the artists.
It isn't. The market says it's worth a lot. But the vast majority of that "a lot" doesn't go to the actual creators. It goes to middlemen.
Unfortunately, the only fix for that, from the creators' point of view, is for them to own the middlemen themselves. But creators generally have neither the time nor the desire to do that, and doing it detracts from their ability to create.
No, customers aren't saying that. Customers are just saying that the final packaged, delivered product they receive (today a better description would be the overall service channel through which they receive the products) is worth what they pay for it. They aren't paying the various contributors separately so their payments say nothing about how much they think those individual contributions are worth.
Nobody is offering them the unpackaged raw product, at least not for creators that work through the big media companies, so it's impossible to know whether they would pay for it if it were offered by the big media companies, and if so, how much they would pay. Some creators do sell direct to customers over the Internet, or make a living through Patreon contributions or something similar, so the package the big media companies are selling is not the only thing customers are buying.
However, it's certainly true that the big media companies do have advantages that they are making full use of. As I said in my original post in this subthread, the only way for creators who don't like the small cut they are getting from the big media companies and want more of the profit for themselves is to do their own distribution instead of doing it through the big media companies. Some are doing that, as I said above, but not many.
Please tell me you meant to do that? Either way, I'm using it from now on!
Now do the opposite.
Figured it out yet?
Music is one of the most universal and important things in our culture. People define themselves and their identity with it, and most certainly value it and will pay for it.
How we structure our economic systems determines if it’s “cheap” or not and who gets the profits from it. It’s certainly not an intrinsic quality.
Not to mention that the most successful and fastest growing digital network of the current generation was built on the back of people dancing to recorded music, almost exclusively newly created music.
I'd rather go back to 80s punk/metal bands playing their barely-in-tune instruments in garages - but it would be fun to see what an open-source LLM fine-tuned on that material would produce. A key condition: The band 'Suicidal Tendencies' could not be excluded on safety-alignment grounds.
How can this be legal? Has it been tried in any court?
To me it feels unlikely that a court would accept the argument that since the Big Three got paid in something other than money they don’t have to pay royalties to the musicians on that. Otherwise what’s stopping any licensee from just charging their customers in gold instead of dollars, and pay zero royalty?
All economic agents (producers, consumers, companies, living people) all want to pay nothing and get everything.
There is little new or special here. 1+1 = 2 and generally the sky is blue.
That being said, yes, the way for creators to capture more of the economic pie is fairly simple if not easy: join up and negotiate en-masse. Especially in industries with powerful entrenched oligopolies like music.
So you would need a way to make setting up and maintaining that common infrastructure very low cost.
Similarly, I liked Jaron Lanier’s “Who Owns the Future?”, which deals with similar topics:
For example: a plaza that is maintained and scheduled by the municipality, with many private business vendors of overlapping goods.
Afaik this is econ 101.
Extended, this is how we shut down our economic engines until we all starve.
The problem is the acceptance of an adversarial nature in the relationships of economic actors. Yes, locally optional and "rational" in a mind destroying manner, so on, and so forth...
> Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking
Doctorow says just pick the right side side of the scaled adversarial conflict.
It turns out we need to stop being adversarial but that's a hard coordination problem. The scalable and acceptable solution to that is the next industrial revolution scale advancement.
It's open source and public domain, uses stripe for holding card information
I also see that you don't handle sales tax which is a bummer and is one of the reasons people use a lot of centralized platforms but I get why you don't because it's a nightmare.
Future work is supporting api/secret keys to bring your own s3 bucket/digital ocean spaces, while keeping the database shared. otherwise it costs roughly $11/mo to host a copy of the platform ($6 for a virtual server and $5 for the digital ocean space)
As for taxes, this will be something that will need to be tackled at some point but so far I've been kicking the can down the road hoping I could find a partner to help figure that out in a clever way that is proper.