The Internet Is Not the Answer (22 page)

In 2013, the top 1% of music artists accounted for 77% of all artist-recorded music income while 99% of artists were hidden under what one 2014 industry report, titled “The Death of the Long Tail,” called “a pervasive shroud of obscurity.”
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This has been caused in part by the increasing monopoly of online music retail stores like iTunes and Amazon and partly by consumers being subjected to the tyranny of an overabundance of choice. This income inequality in the industry is reflected in live music, too, where, between 1982 and 2003, the revenue share of the top 1% of touring acts more than doubled, while the revenue share of the bottom 95% of artists fell in the same period by more than half. As the
Guardian
’s Helienne Lindvall concludes about these trends, “not only is the wider middle class in society shrinking, so is the musician middle class.”
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The most serious casualty of the digital revolution is diversity. This one percent rule is now the dominant economic feature of every cultural sector. According to Jonny Geller, the CEO of a prominent British literary talent agency, the old Pareto law of 80 percent of sales coming from 20 percent of writers is now “more like 96 to four.”
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Meanwhile, a 2014 British study revealed that 54% of conventionally published writers and almost 80% of self-published authors make less than a $1,000 a year from their written work.
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The most serious casualty of the one percent economy in publishing is the disappearance of the “midlist,” which, according to Colin Robinson, the co-publisher of the New York–based print-on-demand publisher OR Books, “comprise[s] pretty much all new titles that are not potential blockbusters.”
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What this means, Robinson warns, is that publishers can no longer afford to gamble on “obscure” or “offbeat” titles—thereby, once again, narrowing rather than broadening the variety of young or new writers in whom they invest.

It’s affecting the e-learning industry, too, where superstar teachers, with instant access to audiences of millions of students, are establishing a two-tiered economy in one of the historically most egalitarian of professions. For example, in
The Smartest Kids in the World
, Amanda Ripley describes a new breed of “rock-star teachers” in Korea like Andrew Kim, who earns $4 million a year from an annual online audience of over 150,000. “The Internet,” Ripley explains about Kim’s success, “had turned his classes into commodities.”
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Today’s hysteria around massive online open courses (MOOCs) threatens to do the same to university education, which is one reason why, in 2013, the philosophy department at San Jose State University balked at including materials from the Harvard academic superstar Michael Sandel in their online courses.
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One star academic, the Princeton sociologist Mitchell Duneier, even cut ties with the Silicon Valley–based MOOC provider Coursera because of his fear that these kind of winner-take-all classes would undermine public higher education.
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As the educationalist William Deresiewicz notes, MOOCs are “not about democratizing education. That is just their cover story.” The truth, Deresiewicz argues, is exactly the reverse. “They’re about reinforcing existing hierarchies and monetizing institutional prestige,” he warns. “The kids at Harvard get to interact with their professors. The kids at San Jose State get to watch the kids at Harvard interact with their professors. San Jose looks worse than before; Harvard looks even better.”
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These inequalities are also reflected in the type of students taking MOOCs. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who looked at 400,000 Coursera students found that most people enrolled in taking these MOOCs were men. “So much for the borderless, gender-blind, class-blind and bank account–blind MOOCs,” notes the technology writer Jessica McKenzie. “If anything, this shows that MOOCs are widening the educational divide, not leveling the playing field.”
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This unequal economy is particularly pronounced in online journalism, where, amid the massive layoffs at regional newspapers, highly paid American reporters like Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, Matt Taibbi, and Glenn Greenwald represent what Emily Bell, the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, calls “a one percent economy.”
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Ironically, for all the talk of how the Internet was supposed to diversify the news industry, the end result of the combination of a one percent economy and massive layoffs is less diversity in the newsroom, with minority employment for American journalists down almost 6% between 2006 and 2012.
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And as Bell also notes, the most recent wave of venture-capital-funded “personal brand” journalist startups are almost all supporting white male superstars like Greenwald, Taibbi, Silver, and Klein.
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But the most damaging discrimination is against paid work. Apart from a few highly paid superstars and winner-take-all venture capital–backed websites like Buzzfeed and Vice, everybody else is participating in what
Guardian
columnist Suzanne Moore describes as a “kind of sophisticated X Factor,” in which we all post our online content for free and hope it will be the next viral success story.
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On the Internet, most of us are perpetual interns. As the author Tim Kreider notes, this lottery is a consequence of an information economy “in which ‘paying for things’ is a quaint discredited old twentieth-century custom, like calling people after having sex with them.”
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This one percent economy forces aspiring artists like the young singer Alina Simone to become startup entrepreneurs of the self and focus on the promotion of their own personal brand rather than their creative work. “What I missed most about not having a label wasn’t the monetary investment, but the right to be quiet, the insulation provided from incessant self-promotion,” Simone writes. “I was a singer, not a saleswoman. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.”
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None of this impacts Silicon Valley’s gilded class. Some—like Google’s Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman—are also part of that tiny elite of best-selling celebrity authors. Indeed, Hoffman’s 2012 bestseller was titled
The Start-up of You
and advised everyone to think about their professional life as if it were an entrepreneurial project. But for those insiders who didn’t get multimillion-dollar book contracts to write about their own success, there’s always the
Huffington Post
—a platform designed for celebrities to post free content that peddles their own agendas, personal brands, or companies.

If there’s a single online media outlet that captures all the hypocrisy of the digital revolution, it’s Arianna Huffington’s online creation—a publication that, like its self-promotional proprietress, dresses itself up as a crusading newspaper, but actually just offers social media hotshots, superstar marketing consultants, and other one percent friends of Arianna a free platform to shamelessly promote themselves. As Peter Goodman, the former global editor of the
Huffington Post
, wrote to Arianna Huffington before very publicly quitting his job in March 2014, “there is a widespread sense on the team that the HuffPost is no longer fully committed to original reporting; that in a system governed largely by metrics, deep reporting and quality writing weigh in as a lack of productivity.”
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What Goodman calls “original reporting” has, according to the media reporter Joe Pompeo, been replaced by a Buzzfeed-like focus on social and mobile platforms where “people love sharing stories about health and meditation and exercise and sleep.”
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“The unfortunate fact is that online journalism can’t survive without a wealthy benefactor,”
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mourns the GigaOm columnist Mathew Ingram. And I’m afraid the same is increasingly becoming true of many unprofitable bookstores, too, which are desperately relying on crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo or Kickstarter to raise money from benefactors.
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And, of course, there is no lack of rich benefactors from Silicon Valley who are buying up the very old media that their revolution has destroyed. The poachers are now the gamekeepers. There is Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate, Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook, who bought the venerable
New Republic
magazine in 2012. Then there’s Amazon right-libertarian CEO Jeff Bezos, who acquired the equally venerable
Washington Post
newspaper in 2013, no doubt giving all its reporters a required reading list including
The Innovator’s Dilemma
and
The Black Swan
. Meanwhile, multibillionaire eBay founder and chairman Pierre Omidyar has set up his own new Internet publishing empire, First Look Media, and used his massive wealth to hire superstar investigative journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi to peddle Omidyar’s own left-libertarian agenda.

For the last quarter of a century, we’ve been told ad nauseam by tenured professors of journalism like New York University’s Jay Rosen that the Internet’s destruction of old media is a good thing because it democratizes the information economy. Making a lucrative career from peddling the idea of the online information consumer as “the People Formerly Known as the Audience,” Rosen has become a cheerleader for the decimation of the curated twentieth-century news industry. But Rosen—who was Arianna Huffington’s partner at a failed citizen journalism initiative called “OffTheBus” and who is now an “advisor” to Omidyar’s First Look Media—is wrong about the Internet’s democratization of media. “The people formerly known as the audience” are still the audience—only now they are angrier and mostly more ill-informed than ever. And “the people who used to be the media owners” remain the media owners. Only now they are called Bezos or Omidyar rather than Sulzberger, Graham, or Hearst. And rather than millionaires, they are now billionaires.

The People Formerly Known as the Audience

The people formerly known as the audience—the online commentators, tweeters, and posters, the lurkers and that quintessential inhabitant of the Internet, the “troll” (a purposeful sower of discord)—are angry. Very angry. According to a 2013 study of the Chinese social media site Weibo made by Beihang University in Beijing, the emotion that spreads most quickly on social media is anger, with joy coming in a very distant second. According to one academic psychologist, professor Ryan Martin from the University of Wisconsin, the reason anger is so viral online is that we are more prone to share our rage with strangers than our happiness.
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“They want to hear that others share it,” Martin says about social neediness of people’s individual anger. “Because they feel they’re vindicated and a little less lonely and isolated in their belief.”

Just as the business of online content is returning to a premodern patronage system, its culture is going backward, too. “You do wonder sometimes whether you’re in 2014 or 1814. People telling me they’re going to turn up on my doorstep and murder me, photos of lynchings, racist abuse, anti-Semitism, homophobic abuse,” the English sports broadcaster Stan Collymore, who had been blitzed with angry insults on Twitter after expressing a mildly controversial opinion about the Uruguayan soccer star Luis Suarez, told the BBC.
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This online hatred isn’t just an English disease. In Spain, eighteen thousand people used Twitter in May 2014 to post tweets with a hateful anti-Semitic hashtag after a Madrid team was beaten by Maccabi Tel Aviv in the final of the European basketball tournament.
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It wasn’t, of course, supposed to turn out this way. According to Internet evangelists like Jay Rosen, Tim O’Reilly, and the FOO Camp unestablishment, the Internet’s so-called disintermediation of media gatekeepers would inspire a democratic enlightenment in which anyone could voice their opinion online through free networks like Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook. The old media, they said, was parochial, self-interested, and sexist; new media, in contrast, would reflect a broad diversity of opinion outside the stuffy old elites at the
New York Times
, the BBC, and CNN. Old media represented power and privilege, they claimed; new media would empower the weak, the unfortunate, those traditionally without a voice.

But just as the Internet has added to economic inequality, so it has also compounded hatred toward the very defenseless people it was supposed to empower. Today’s network, of course, didn’t invent hatred. And much of the rage articulated on the Internet would have existed whether or not Tim Berners-Lee had invented the Web. But the Internet has nonetheless become a platform for amplifying the views of what media critic Jeff Jarvis calls the “plague of trolls, abusers, harassers, lunatics, imposters, and assholes online.”.
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And things are only getting worse. “The Internet,” the
New York Times’
Farhad Manjoo warns, “may be losing the war against trolls” because the speed and chaos of social media provides these anonymous hooligans with the cover to distribute their poisonous messages.
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“The faster that the whole media system goes, the more trolls have a foothold to stand on,” explains Whitney Phillips, an academic expert on online bad behavior. “They are perfectly calibrated to exploit the way media is disseminated these days.”
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