"it is a reflection of the fundamental reality that the supply of content (and increasingly goods) is infinite, and thus worthless"
No, the supply of worthless content is infinite. The supply of interesting content provided by professionals with the backgrounds necessary to provide such content is not. This is why you still see the majority of journalistic content provided by a small number of organizations, with the rest simply aggregating that content. Facebook, Google, etc. actually produce very little cultural value on their own. Their entire existence is predicated on co-opting the content of others for free and using it to make money. It's a heck of a business model, if you can get away with it, but let's stop pretending that good content just appears out of thin air...
Most of the interesting content I read is produced by amateurs. Amateur writers, that is. They're professionals in whatever domain they happen to be writing about - food blogs written by chefs, programming blogs written by software engineers, startup blogs written by VCs & entrepreneurs, hardware blogs written by electrical engineers, gaming screencasts produced by gamers, political blogs written by political science professors.
I think that what the Internet revealed is that being able to write well takes a back seat to knowing information worth writing about. Content over form, in other words. In the old days, you needed dedicated reporters who would go ask the actual experts their opinions on events because most people could not hold down two jobs, and an industrial company is not going to also operate a printing press. Now, with the ease & reach of publishing becoming so much greater, it becomes much easier to publish on your nights and weekends, as a way of getting your name out in the field. I actually view mainstream media as "low quality" now, because when you compare any piece with the blog of the experts actually quoted in it, you see just how many omissions and distortions appear in it.
Experts in a professional fields have been writing books for hundreds of years. How is anything fundamentally different now? The shortened cycle?
Experts in various fields have written guest columns for newspapers since before the U.S. declared independence.
Tabloid and marginally amateur newspapers previously outnumbered the established publications. When new towns and cities were formed in the American Frontier, often a printing press was brought with the first businesses.
Your argument appears to follow from the premise that "MSM is bad" and then seeks justification in a just-so story of the old days that isn't accurate.
I'm not defending modern journalism's accuracy. I'm disputing your assertion that the consolidated journalism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are the default. On the contrary, they are abnormal with respect to the rest of American history.
Thompson's point here isn't about the content itself, but rather the supply chain for the content. Because the internet effectively provides 'infinite' distribution, the traditional models of controlling distribution are worthless. This is a very consistent theme in his writings.
Consider that both the worthless and valuable content that you've defined use the same methods for distribution; Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.
Yes, but production <> distribution. It still costs money to produce something of value, whether it's an article in a magazine or an album. The fact that it costs virtually nothing to reproduce an album or distribute it digitally does not negate the investment it took to produce it. And the fact remains that Facebook and Google, among many others, profited handsomely from this confusion.
Compare with the second paragraph:
"The reality is that Facebook is one of the most powerful companies the tech industry — and arguably, the world — has ever seen. True, everything posted on Facebook is put there for free, either by individuals or professional content creators; and true, Facebook isn’t really irreplaceable when it comes to the generation of economic value; and it is also true that there are all kinds of alternatives when it comes to communication. However, to take these truths as evidence that Facebook is fragile requires a view of the world that is increasingly archaic."
FB doesn't pay for the content, which is a major advantage over traditional companies that do both creation and distribution (newspapers) or ones where content is licensed somehow (television, music labels). FB is agnostic to the costs of creating the content, but their networks necessitate producers to user their platform.
I think that we're going to see how this all shakes out soon enough, and it will probably be one of the business stories of the 21st century.
If the current model is sustainable, then it will continue. I personally think that too much value is being captured on the distribution side, that the content creators are wise to it, and that you're going to see a continual shift in power back to the content creators as they become more and more creative in how they withhold content from free-rider distribution/access platforms that they view as a net negative to their bottom line.
True. I think the author was a bit hasty in how he phrased things here. Given the context of the rest of his writing it's pretty clear that he's talking about the overall supply chain of content as opposed to the demand side.
Basically the insight is that, for a lot of industries, the internet has caused a general shift in the center of power from the supply side to the demand side. Fifty years ago you could maintain a strong and powerful position by controlling the supply chain for media content. Largely this was because supplying media was pretty hard - you had to find and organize the writers/artists, physically manufacture it, and distribute it across a given geographic area. Because it was challenging to supply media, there were relatively few options that consumers had access to, so if you managed to bring something to market it was relatively easy to find people who would be interested in buying it.
The internet turned that dynamic on its head. Now all those challenges with getting media into peoples' hands have evaporated. Of course it's still really hard to produce great content - and individual creators can still do fantastically well - but there is much less money to be made by bringing the content that creators create to the market. Instead, the more powerful position is to control the consumer relationship and let the content creators come to you. In a marketplace where there is a massive supply of different things for consumers to consume it's hard for any one creator/supplier to stand out and get the attention of consumers. So a company that does hold a lot of consumer mind-share and can act as a kind of entry-point to the market for consumers, like Netflix or Facebook, has a ton of leverage over suppliers.
And these companies do add value for consumers. It's overwhelming to have so many different options to chose from. It's nice to have someone help me navigate the choices, or even just present me a steady feed of content I might like.
We're seeing this dynamic not just in markets for media but also in markets for things like furniture and even consumer financial products - Houzz and Credit Karma, respectively, are both trying to be consumer gatekeepers, which will give them tremendous power in their markets.
> It still costs money to produce something of value
It costs rapidly decreasing amounts to produce something of value.
If you want a few stabs from a violin in your song, you rarely need to hire a concert violinist these days, thanks to recordings and software-synthesizers based on infinitely reproducible code and data.
Absolutely, but that doesn't mean that it's still easy to produce the final work. If anyone can do it, then it's obviously not valuable.
Take "Stranger Things" on Netflix, for example. I normally hate sci-fi, but this was one heck of a great season 1 for a series. Did it take a lot less in terms of technical know-how/costs to produce than it would have taken in the 80's ? Sure, no doubt. But, it still is a very unique cultural work that is definitely more valuable than something created by another group of people with access to the exact same technology, but producing something of lesser value. The secret sauce is the people involved and their life experiences, knowledge, and expertise, none of which are "free".
> But, it still is a very unique cultural work that is definitely more valuable than something created by another group of people with access to the exact same technology, but producing something of lesser value
Human cultural value != market-value. This is what I'm getting at.
What was the incremental cost to you to watch each episode?
How much did you pay to watch ET? Buy a Twin Peaks box-set?
> The secret sauce is the people involved and their life experiences, knowledge, and expertise, none of which are "free".
You can find free life-experiences (Medium, Twitter), knowledge and expertise (Github, Wikipedia, Quora) all over the internet.
I'm not saying that people don't need money to exist, or that as we're able to produce more, cultural exhanges are worth subjectively less to other humans (quite the opposite).
I'm saying that the costs of people producing things is decreasing rapidly. What is increasing is the net share of value which is captured by distribution platforms.
It's relevant that you can only watch Stranger Things on Netflix --- you can't 'buy it', you need to pay a rent in perpetuity to watch your favorite shows at your own discretion. This is only possible due to the power which the distribution platform (Netflix) has accumulated.
Of course, there is good, free content everywhere, but it is normally in the form of endeavors that don't take a lot of time or are hobbies. As soon as something starts to take more than X amount of hours per week, it has to either start bringing in revenue or it has to stop growing. In other words, there is no limit to the breadth of the content that can be available for free, but there are hard financial limits to the depth of the content that can be available for free.
Re: Netflix: I think Netflix is a good example of a distribution platform that is in a more symbiotic relationship with its content creators. The content creators get the eyeballs for their work and, more importantly, get paid, while Netflix takes their cut. However, this is also changing as Netflix becomes both content creator and distribution platform. As to being able to purchase Netflix content elsewhere, I think it all comes down to the extra revenue vs. possible loss of subscription revenue. For now I think the equation is tilted towards the latter, hence you won't see that content elsewhere. My understanding is that other content creators are getting more than a little nervous about the Netflix-branded content, so they might start playing hardball.
The NYT is already longer than anyone has time to read daily, even retired people. Ditto WSJ etc. There are more good movies than you could ever watch. Too many really good TV shows to keep up with.
By "infinite," the OP really means "vastly overwhelmingly larger than demand." Of course there's also plenty of dreck, but that's not the article's point.
There is an argument that automation, and the fact that increasingly the goods we desire are digital, means that the marginal reproduction costs of many goods are trending towards zero (with obvious exceptions, like housing).
Without effective regulation, this puts all the power in the hands of naturally monopolistic distribution platforms.
For example, the only reason why an infinitely reproducible MP3 costs $0.99 is because Apple's lawyers say it does, Facebook get to decide the cost in digital-autonomy for you to speak to your aunt.
Over the last few years this seems to have drifted from academic-Marxian/airport-business-book/TED lore to a motivation for seriously exploring policies like UBI (including by Y Combinator).
Thompson would be the first to agree with you. He would in fact point to his very own business as an example that he believes in well-researched, expensive to produce content. He would then go on to argue that similar content sources will have to find ways of making money that don't involve putting display ads next to their content.
I think we're already seeing this in regards to YouTube monetization, there are a few YouTubers at the top of the pyramid making money and their content is increasingly "professional" - albeit with an air of amateur needed to connect to audiences. But the rest of the pyramid has collapsed and with it the MCN industry built on the idea that there was monetization scale in crappy content.
Exactly this. My facebook newsfeed is full of worthless content, which, though once fun and interesting is now a commodity (cat videos, for example)
As someone in my mid twenties, I spend far more time on instagram and snapchat than on facebook. If facebook was to disappear tomorrow, it'd probably be okay with me. Imagine for a second if Facebook hadn't acquired Instagram. Attention shifts very quickly in the digital world, quicker than a lot of people think.
If your Facebook feed is worthless, it's your fault. Either you have nobody you care about or you like worthless stuff. I'm connected with family and friends, I'm following interesting people and liked interesting pages. My newsfeed is full of great content, from people I care about or page with content I want to read/watch.
"it is a reflection of the fundamental reality that the supply of content (and increasingly goods) is infinite, and thus worthless"
No, the supply of worthless content is infinite. The supply of interesting content provided by professionals with the backgrounds necessary to provide such content is not. This is why you still see the majority of journalistic content provided by a small number of organizations, with the rest simply aggregating that content. Facebook, Google, etc. actually produce very little cultural value on their own. Their entire existence is predicated on co-opting the content of others for free and using it to make money. It's a heck of a business model, if you can get away with it, but let's stop pretending that good content just appears out of thin air...