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Javier E

Podcasting Blossoms, but in Slow Motion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ossoms-but-in-slow-motion.html

podcasting radio media trends publishing

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The largest podcasting operations are attracting sizable audiences and advertising revenue. The ads work. Large and small advertisers report a significant upside to the campaigns they run on podcasts, and ad rates on top-tier podcasts approach $100 per thousand listeners, which is many times what it costs advertisers to reach audiences in most other digital formats.
  • the overall audience for podcasts is growing very slowly. In February, Edison Research reported that 17 percent of Americans had listened to one podcast in the previous month. That is up just slightly from Edison’s 2012 survey, when 14 percent of Americans had done so. The business also has some problems, including a labor-intensive ad-buying process, a shortage of audio producers and the inability to accurately measure who is listening.
  • it is that rarest thing in the technology industry: a slow, steady and unrelentingly persistent digital tortoise that could eventually — but who really knows? — slay the analog behemoths in its path.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The share of podcasts in Americans’ diet of audio programming grew by 18 percent from 2014 to 2015, according to Edison. People who listen to podcasts daily spend about two hours a day, on average, with podcasts, a larger share than for any other form of audio, Edison reported
  • For Gimlet, listeners’ willingness to try new podcasts has translated into instant audiences for its newest shows. “Startup,” the company’s first show, took 30 days to reach 100,000 listeners a week. Its weekly audience is now more than 500,000. “Mystery Show” took four days to reach 100,000 listeners, mainly because it was being promoted by Gimlet’s two other shows. By its fourth episode, its audience was about 250,000 weekly listens.
  • Several advertisers told me that podcast ads had proved to be tremendously effective. They can’t be easily skipped, and because they are often read by hosts, audiences are often convinced of their authenticity. “We feel it creates a deep personal connection to our brand,”
  • Podcasting is destined to be huge, both as a medium and a business. “It’s the future of radio,” Mr. Turck of Panoply said. Just don’t expect that future to come tomorrow.
anonymous

Hard and Soft Threats to Democracy - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/-and-soft-threats-to-democracy

democracy conspiracy misinformation

shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • an assortment of QAnon kooks has taken to claiming that Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20 was unconstitutional and that Donald Trump will be returning in splendor on March 4 for the real inauguration.The rumors swirling about the possibility of violence on March 4 were given legitimacy on Wednesday, when the Capitol Police released a statement saying, “We have obtained intelligence that shows a possible plot to breach the Capitol by an identified militia group on Thursday, March 4.”
  • Meaning that domestic terrorists have succeeded in shutting down the government again. This time it happened without anyone breaching a single security fence. The threat of another national security event, however remote, was enough for them to win
  • At Wednesday’s hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray, for example, instead of focusing on the individuals who planned the attack and the spectacular security failures that allowed it to unfold, senators spent much of their time promoting or refuting, depending on their party affiliation, the claim that Antifa was responsible.
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  • The fact that, for some reason, it took President Trump’s Department of Defense more than three hours to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol on January 6 doesn’t concern former Vice President Mike Pence, who was targeted by the mob. He finally broke his silence on Wednesday—only to push an op-ed based on the big election lie and blasting “leftists” who “want you powerless at the ballot box.”
  • the threat to our democracy is coming from conspiracy theorists in the Republican party
Javier E

Would You Date a Podcast Bro? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dating-men-with-podcasts.html

podcast mansplaining culture

shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • it wasn’t just the content of the man’s podcast, but that he had one at all. Like many other women, she associates the form with a certain kind of man: one who is endlessly fascinated by his own opinions, loves the sound of his own voice and isn’t the least bit shy about offering unsolicited opinions on masculinity, sexuality and women. Many women have taken to social media to mock just that kind of programming and the men who make it.
  • With the once-booming podcast industry currently on the back foot and hosts’ reputations for self-important mansplaining having long since caught up with them, is the “podcast bro” officially a persona non grata in today’s dating landscape?
Javier E

I Tried to Live Like Joe Rogan - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...594802

politics culture influencer podcasting

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous-girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys.
  • His interview last fall with Elon Musk has been viewed more than 24 million times on YouTube, and his YouTube channel, PowerfulJRE, has 6 million subscribers. An indifferently received episode will tend to get somewhere around 1 million views.
  • there’s no real way to describe “Joe Rogan fans.” They’re not aligned around any narrow set of curiosities or politics. They’re aligned around Joe.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • He knows that he is privileged by virtue of his gender and his skin color, but in his heart he is sick of being reminded about it. Like lots of other white men in America, he is grappling with a growing sense that the term white man has become an epithet
  • The bedrock issue, though, is Rogan’s courting of a middle-bro audience that the cultural elite hold in particular contempt—guys who get barbed-wire tattoos and fill their fridge with Monster energy drinks and preordered their tickets to see Hobbs & Shaw. Joe loves these guys
  • Why is he connecting so deeply with so many men, for such long stretches of time, at a moment when no one else can seem to hold anyone’s attention for more than two minutes?
  • There’s a tendency right now to make every single thing about Donald Trump, but if you don’t see the dotted line connecting the president to a wave of men who feel thwarted and besieged and sentenced to an endless apology tour, then you’re not paying attention.
  • The hard truth for some of Rogan’s critics in the media is that he is much better at captivating audiences than most of us, because he has the patience and the generosity to let his interviews be an experience rather than an inquisition.
  • how many mainstream entertainers routinely expose their audiences to Harvard biologists? Or climate-change experts? (The Uninhabitable Earth author David Wallace-Wells, episode No. 1259.) Or biosocial scientists? (The Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, episode No. 1274.) Or ethical-leadership lecturers? (The NYU Stern business-school professor Jonathan Haidt, episode No. 1221.)
  • “Learn, learn, learn, ladies and gentlemen,” Joe said at the start of one podcast episode this winter, wrapping up an ad read for the online education platform Skillshare. “That’s what I’m getting out of this. I think it’s very important to continue to challenge your mind.”
  • He’s right! It is! And don’t we want men thirsting for knowledge? Don’t we want them striving, setting goals, learning, learning, learning? Don’t we want more Joes?
  • Plenty of the role models that men choose for themselves draw eye rolls from everyone else, or dire warnings, or #cancel tweets
  • if we’re all going to make it through this era alive, men do need alternatives to look up to
  • the irony is that so many of the men who demonstrate a level of intelligence and empathy worth aspiring to—they’ve pretty much all been on Joe Rogan’s podcast
  • Free speech and its consequences, particularly the deplatforming of right-wing political provocateurs, is a push-button subject for Rogan, and it’s where he gets himself into the most trouble.
  • the same core stimulus: a plunging sense of self-worth caused by a rapidly changing society.
  • that’s not why people are obsessed with him. In reality, it’s because Joe Rogan is a tireless optimist, a grab-life-by-the-throat-and-bite-out-its-esophagus kind of guy, and many, many men respond to that.
  • like lots of other men in America, not just the white ones, he’s reckoning out loud with a fear that the word masculinity has become, by definition, toxic
  • It’s a tough message for a very rich guy like Joe Rogan to sell, but he pulls it off because he has never stopped coming across as stubbornly normal. He’s from a middle-class Boston suburb, he’s bald, and for God’s sake, his name is Joe.
  • Rogan seems like a regular Joe, but he’s not. He is driven, inexhaustible, and an honest-to-goodness autodidact.
  • His brain is wicked absorbent, like Neo in The Matrix, uploading knowledge through a hot spear jammed into the back of his skull. He’s a freak of nature, and most of his fans cannot, in fact, be just like him.
  • a key thing Joe and his fans tend to have in common is a deficit of empathy. He seems unable to process how his tolerance for monsters like Alex Jones plays a role in the wounding of people who don’t deserve it.
  • At the very least, he shows too much compassion for bad actors, and not enough for people on the receiving end of their attacks.
  • In order to get at the truth of Joe’s beliefs, you have to ignore what he says and watch what he does. Rogan likes to say that he’s voted for a Democrat in every presidential election—aside from a brief ill-advised fling with Gary Johnson—and that he despises Trump.
  • More revealing is who he invites onto his podcast, and what subjects he chooses to feast on in his stand-up specials. And if you cast a wide enough net, clear patterns emerge. If there’s a woman or a person of color (or both) on Joe’s podcast, the odds are high that person is a fighter or an entertainer, and not a public intellectual.
  • if you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things “gay,” vegan bullies,
  • All the same, because of their core DNA and their comfort with getting booed, comedians still tend to be at the forefront of so many of these debates over language and identity, touching those electrical wires in ways other people wouldn’t dare. Joe touches them all the time
  • The competitive energy, the drive to succeed, the search for purpose, for self-respect. Get better every day. Master your domain. Total human optimization
  • Joe likes Jack. He likes Milo Yiannopoulos. He likes Alex Jones. He wants you to know that he doesn’t agree with much of what they say, but he also wants you to know that off camera they’re the nicest guys. If we all have fatal flaws, this is Joe’s: his insistence on seeing value in people even when he shouldn’t, even when they’ve forfeited any right to it, even when the harm outweighs the good.
  • It comes from a generous place, but it amounts to careless cruelty. He just won’t write people off, and then he compounds the sin by throwing them a lifeline at the moment when they least deserve it.
  • His invitation to Jones was indefensible, and his defense was even worse. I had assumed going in that Rogan would explain himself at the top, similar to what he’d done after booting the Jack Dorsey interview. But he didn’t. He went the other way. He promised a “fun” interview with Jones, as if it was a joyful, long-awaited reunion rather than offensive for even existing, and he assured his listeners that “you’re gonna love it.”
  • My Joe Rogan experience ended because he wore me out. He never shuts up. He talks and talks and talks. He doesn’t seem to grasp that not every thought inside his brain needs to be said out loud. It doesn’t occur to him to consider whether his contributions have value. He just speaks his mind. He just whips it out and drops it on the table.
  • And yet I came away more comfortable with Joe’s vision of manhood—and more determined to do the exact opposite.
  • I’m glad, though, that the men of America have Joe Rogan to motivate and inspire and educate them in limitless ways, including how to recognize a moron
  • Rogan’s podcast gushes like a mighty river of content—approximately three episodes a week, usually more than two hours per episode, consisting of one marathon conversation with a subject of his choosing. Over the course of about 1,400 episodes and counting, his roster of guests can be divided roughly three ways: (1) comedians, (2) fighters, and (3) “thinkers,”
Javier E

The Pied Pipers of the Dirtbag Left Want to Lead Everyone to Bernie Sanders - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-sanders-chapo-trap-house.html

history left radical 2020 election culture crisis despair

shared by Javier E on 29 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • “Chapo Trap House,” which started in 2016, typically runs between 60 and 90 minutes. Two episodes are released every week, one for free and one for the nearly 38,000 people who pay $5 a month through the crowdfunding site Patreon. It leads to a financial windfall for the self-professed socialists who are harnessing this rage: $168,800 a month from those subscribers alone.
  • the Sanders campaign maintains a close relationship with the podcast. His senior adviser, David Sirota, and his national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, have also been on the podcast. At the Iowa show, a Sanders volunteer stood at the door with fliers and pins to hand out and an email list to gather names.
  • Their followers — on the night in Iowa City more than 700 strong — come to hear them rage for three hours against the student debt, the high rent, the dead-end creative class jobs, and the feeling of hopelessness fighting against a liberal political establishment that seems polite when they are angry.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • “It’s really easy to feel alone in America. It’s the loneliest place in the loneliest time,” the co-host Felix Biederman said, speaking of the early days of their work. “But eventually people started to gather around all these posts into the void.”
  • The topic is inequality, raging against the rich.
  • Julius Krein, the conservative founder of the new publication American Affairs, has noticed the new allies.“There is a lot of interesting convergence on some of the anti-woke thinking and many things that, perhaps surprisingly, we agree on, for different reasons,”
  • “It’s fairly easy to have fun, pretty exciting dialogue between right-wing anti-neoliberals and left-wing anti-neoliberals.”
  • “‘Chapo Trap House,’ the entire Dirtbag Left, have tapped that male privilege of intimidating people into assuming you’re cool,” said Amanda Marcotte, a liberal feminist writer for Salon
  • ,
  • These Sanders supporters eschew the idea of party unity as a scam: “I won’t vote for anyone but Bernie in the general, can’t say what the hundreds of thousands of people who listen to my show will do, but I’m only speaking for myself,” Mr. Menaker wrote on Twitter a day after the Iowa caucuses.
  • An additional challenge is that as the free-floating anger they stoke finds community, it is escalating and souring into sometimes violent and ugly rhetoric
  • For the hosts and their fans, those sort of tweets and the podcast language are all jokes. The audience understands the difference, they argue, and anyway the real problem with the Democrats is that they’re overly sensitive. A bunch of self-serious P.M.C.s (members of the professional-managerial class).
  • Over the summer, the “Chapo Trap House” message board, which has nearly 153,000 members who chat about the news and memes of the day, was censured by Reddit, which hosts it
  • They want what Mr. Sanders wants: universal health care, canceled student loans, free college, and an overhaul of the tax system. They want to cut the national prison population by half and to install a ban on fracking. And for them anything less than this is nothing at all
  • “We do everything our parents say, and it doesn’t work,” said Brayson Cope, 18, a college student from Altoona and a Sanders volunteer.His reason for listening to “Chapo" is simple, he said.“They’re angry. I like it because they’re angry.”
  • “The reason for the quarantine is that we have observed repeated rule-breaking behavior in your community, especially in the form of encouragement of violence,”
  • according to fans of the podcast and movement, there are a lot of neoliberal shills out there.
  • For many left-wing groups, the Chapo podcast and its Reddit community are now setting the weekly conversation agenda.
  • “It’s a touchstone,” said Brendan McGillicuddy, 39, who teaches in the cultural studies department at the University of Minnesota. “At my workplace, everyone listens to it, even if you don’t like it.”
  • When Hillary Clinton’s name came up, the reaction was nearly indistinguishable from a Trump rally.“Lock her up,” the co-host Matt Christman said to the crowd.The crowd began to chant: Lock her up. Lock her up.
  • During the three-hour show, there is little vision laid out for what they want, beyond a Sanders presidency. There is a vision for what they want destroyed and how good it will feel to do that. The idea of actually taking power is terrifying, and they say so.“What’s scary is the idea that this could end,” Mr. Biederman said. “What’s scary is we’re not just tossing catharsis into the void, that this is something real. We are there.”
  • “It’s a common experience to be someone with a crappy job who does not have an outlet for your set of beliefs and you feel insane because you’re surrounded by liberals or Evangelicals or whatever stultifying milieu,” he said. “And one day you find a piece of media with some folks who are articulating what you always believed: You’re not crazy, you’re right, this is exactly how the world works, and you’re getting screwed.”
  • He said he knew that the anger the podcast was building could be dangerous, but he said the anger — and the fear of violence it brings — was good.
  • “Educating a generation and saddling them with debt and then not giving them jobs where they have the wage that they presume they should receive based on the amount of time they spent on education,” Virgil said. “That’s a pretty good way to turn them into radicals.”He is a good example of his own target audience: He graduated with $100,000 of debt from Cornell and after college took freelance gigs from Craigslist, hoping to write.
  • While the Chapo hosts rail against the media establishment, they are also deeply entwined with it and largely beloved by it. (Mr. Menaker, for example, grew up on the Upper West Side, the son of a New York Times editor and a New Yorker editor.)
  • He does not want to live in a capitalist society at all.“I think it’s a moral stain to live in this society,” he said. “And every day I think, God I’d rather just leave.”But he’s not sure where he would move
  • Outside the Iowa City show, Adam Angstead, 46, had stepped out of the theater for a cigarette. He works for the Iowa City school district as a substitute teacher five days a week, but he said his employment offers no benefits. On the weekends he works at a diner. Twice a week he sells his blood plasma for extra cash.It’s still not enough. He was trying to pay down his $40,000 in student loans for a while, but it hardly made a dent, and recently he has gotten a deferment. For him, the primary feels like a life-or-death battle.“Being in a room with a bunch of people who think the same thing or close made me think we might not all literally die,” he said. “Bernie’s the only one.”
Javier E

Trump's puerile letter to Erdogan should give every American the chills - The Washingto... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...uld-give-every-american-chills

trump letter turkey history diplomacy

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The letter damningly confirms many of the traits that the president’s critics have long assumed: It shows Trump to be uninformed, narcissistic and naive. It shows him as obsessed with process and uninterested in substance, craving the applause of a multitude whose identities he does not know.
  • It is the sort of note one could imagine coming from a clique leader in a movie about high-school angst, such as “Mean Girls” or “Heathers,” not a man who has access to the nuclear button.
  • Political leaders always have some aim in mind beyond the deal itself. For some, it is keeping or extending power. For others, it is the accomplishment of some task consistent with a set of articulated principles. But for all, any deal must be seen as consistent with those larger aims. Trump’s letter ignores this basic political instinct.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Look at the world from Erdogan’s point of view.
  • Turkey has a long, troubled relationship with the Kurds living in its own country. It has suppressed the Kurdish language; sporadically carried on a guerrilla war against Kurdish separatists within its borders and beyond; and views the Syrian Kurds as in league with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a group it considers a terrorist organization.
  • Add to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts
  • A nationalistic war against a longtime enemy could also shore up Erdogan’s flagging political standing at home.
Javier E

What Spotify and the 'Audio Industry' Are Doing to Musicians - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...621503

audio industry music internet history culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • At its best, Spotify is an elegant tool—a conduit between artist and art and listener. But at its worst, it’s a bad actor in a worse industry that historically treats artists miserably
  • Even though the small number of streaming services have access to almost every bit of music that’s ever been recorded, and even though they strike near-monopolistic deals with near-monopolistic major labels, there isn’t quite enough money for anyone to make a good profit on streaming music. Too many middlemen take their share, and there’s a limit to how much people are willing to pay for music now that the internet exists.
  • The biggest tech companies have other ways to make money: Apple sold music by the song before starting a streaming service but always generated most of its earnings off hardware; Google has a seemingly infinite array of mysterious revenue sources.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Spotify doesn’t have those things to turn to. So it’s been turning to podcasts. Besides enticing new subscribers with Spotify-branded podcasts—Rogan and Gimlet Media at the forefront of these—Spotify gets a new place to run ads. The podcast-advertising ecosystem is still lush enough to support additional harvesting. Spotify is betting that what used to be known as the music industry is in fact dead but that maybe the company can make money in the “audio industry.” But that shift involves decisions that disappoint even people jaded by years of experience with the recording business.
  • In the context of the devaluation of so many artists’ work, the backing of Rogan feels like a particularly nihilistic move. Spotify didn’t sign him for his talent or care at all about his impact—good or ill—on the world; with a heartless, almost video-game sensibility, they signed him to take market share from Apple and Google
  • Complaints against bloodless businessmen are hardly new. But what’s happening in music today feels less like individual acts of exploitation and more like the razing of an ecosystem.
  • When Rogan announced his signing, he emphasized that Spotify would have no creative control over his podcast. He was agreeing to a licensing deal, but he wouldn’t be an employee. “It will be the exact same show,” Rogan claimed
  • His comments fell somewhere between the gentle vibe of “Look, man, they’re offering me $100 million, so, uh, what am I supposed to do?” and a more aggressive “Spotify doesn’t own me, man. They are renting me for a certain period of time for $100 million—that’s different.” It’s infuriating that Rogan’s podcast has the trappings of counterculture while finding itself in such particular proximity to money and tech power. But I don’t know that, if I were Rogan, I would do much different.
  • Others in the “audio industry” face more discouraging trends. I suspect that the big record companies would dissolve if they weren’t still making so much money off the music of the 20th century.
  • I knew a lot of bands in the early 2000s whose members could quit their day job for a few years and make a living on relatively small amounts of record sales coupled with touring
  • Today, fewer artists are crossing the bar of being able to live purely off making and performing music. A lot of artists are failing to find a place in an “audio industry” that ever more efficiently mines smaller veins for what little cash can be extracted, or in a broader entertainment industry that has more in common with Marvel-movie spectacle than any particular sort of artistry.
  • My deep dread, though, is that this ability to tune out and focus on art becomes an aristocratic luxury; that a lack of money for music means a lack of money for musicians; that new ways of doing business are destroying the possibility of a creative middle class.
  • Solidarity is a tempting response to technological change, but my tired brain just can’t see the mechanism for it in this era. I honestly feel like a master sock weaver at the start of the industrial revolution. People will still get their socks, maybe worse than the ones before. And in the end, technology will plow us over.
Javier E

Revolutions by Mike Duncan on Apple Podcasts - 0 views

itunes.apple.com/...id703889772

History politics revolution english civil war haiti france

shared by Javier E on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • Javier E on 21 May 18
     
    A weekly podcast exploring great political revolutions.
Javier E

Opinion | The hidden scam behind Tucker Carlson and the right's 'replacement' game - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...lson-replacement-rhetoric-scam

replacement scam racism gop immigration

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • a key fact about this narrative: It gets an important truth exactly backward.
  • The aging Whites this story targets will be relying on social insurance programs whose durability will heavily depend on immigrant taxpayers to sustain it, meaning they have a great deal to lose from decreased immigration.
  • With or without immigration, the White share of the population will decline in the coming decades, census projections show. But if immigration is reduced or eliminated, America will grow older, with many fewer working-age adults available to support an exploding number of retirees.And that would not only slow overall economic growth, multiple projections have found, but also would increase pressure for cuts in the Social Security and Medicare benefits that provide a lifeline to the older Whites most drawn to the right’s anti-immigrant arguments.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The “replacement” demagoguery seeks to exploit fears rooted in reaction to a truism: Immigrants have increased as a share of the U.S. population since national origins quotas were ended in the 1960s.
  • But as Brownstein notes, the further “browning” of America will be caused not primarily by new immigration, but rather the higher reproduction rates of immigrants already here and their descendants, relative to slower reproduction among Whites.
  • That means restricting immigration, even severely, cannot halt the transition to a majority-minority country by 2060. But it would mean a smaller workforce relative to the aging population.
  • To fully appreciate what a despicable scam this is, however, we need to look at the darker implications of the “replacement” narrative.
  • The argument isn’t just that liberals want more immigration to win future elections. It’s also that elites are deliberately importing more immigrants to threaten aging Whites’ long term survival.
  • Prominent Republicans who have echoed Carlson’s line in a deceptively softer form also trade on this idea. They have said liberals want more immigration to “permanently transform” our “political landscape” and to “remake the demographics of America” to “stay in power forever.”
  • What’s unmistakable, again and again, is the dark invocation of permanent erasure and elimination
  • There’s an audience for this: A recent survey by GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson found that nearly half of Republican respondents believe politics is about “ensuring the country’s survival as we know it.” As Anderson told Ezra Klein, there is a “real sense in the Republican coalition today that they are under siege.”
  • As Ed Kilgore writes, this intimation of an “overclass-underclass alliance” that feasts parasitically on the authentic “producerist” majority of “hard-working Americans” is a decades-old right wing populist trope that trades in “paranoia” of “uncommon power.”
woodlu

What Spotify should learn from the Joe Rogan affair | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...21807509

culture policy

shared by woodlu on 03 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Yet he has broken no laws, nor even, Spotify seems to believe, the company’s content rules.
  • As a matter of principle, Mr Rogan should be able to speak. As a commercial question, Spotify has made a publisher’s gamble that his wildly popular show will attract more customers than it repels—just as Netflix recently bet that Dave Chappelle’s risqué comedy show would tickle more subscribers than it turned off. The gamble is, in the most literal sense, Spotify’s business.
  • The result is that the content mix on audio platforms is starting to look less like the curated library of Netflix and more like the infinite hotch-potch of YouTube. Unlike other social networks, however, audio platforms have little experience in moderating content.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Most of the 3.2m podcasters on Spotify are not like Mr Rogan, who sold his show to the company in 2020 for a reported $100m. The vast majority are amateurs,
  • The vaccines bust-up is their first taste of an argument that other social networks have grappled with for years and which is now coming to audio.
  • On the one hand, most consumers want protection from the most harmful content, the best example being the incitement to violence, which even America’s First Amendment condemns.
  • On the other hand, few want tech executives to become censors. Plenty of good music features bad language, disturbing ideas and violence. Some podcasts will stoke controversy. Free speech must be the default.
  • The starting point is transparency, which the audio platforms sorely lack.
  • Apple, the next-biggest streamer, has content guidelines for podcasts but a rough style guide for music. Amazon, the third-largest, has published even less in the way of rules. And whereas Facebook and co release regular reports on what content they have taken down and why, the audio streamers are opaque.
  • Amid the Rogan crisis, Spotify casually mentioned that it had removed 20,000 other podcast episodes over covid misinformation. What else is it taking down? No one knows
  • But clear, predictable rules can protect speech as much as containing it. Rules determine not just what is banned, but also help defend what is allowed.
  • The social networks are far from perfect, but rules that are open to public scrutiny can gradually be improved on.
  • By contrast, the failure to spell out what is and isn’t allowed risks having a chilling effect, in which people steer clear of controversy for fear of triggering the unpredictable censor.
  • The lack of well-defined rules encourages an ongoing free-for-all of the sort seen this week, in which critics hope that by withdrawing their business or shouting loudly enough, they can force companies to cancel acts they disapprove of.
  • As platforms like Spotify open their gates to more user-generated content, the same free-speech battles are coming to audio. Streamers should get their rules ready now, and prepare for the next, inevitable explosion.
malonema1

Emergency Politics Podcast: The U.K. Election | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...itics-podcast-the-u-k-election

UK

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Emergency Politics Podcast: The U.K. Election
  • No party won a majority in a snap election called by Prime Minister Theresa May, who was hoping to expand her previous majority as she negotiates the U.K.’s exit from the European Union.
katherineharron

Trump's post-presidency: On the attack with the help of the Fox and Newsmax propaganda ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 23 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Former President Donald Trump was audible, if not visible, all day long on Monday — and the effect is to keep him front and center in the Republican Party conversation.
  • His unwillingness, or inability, to lay low is exactly what many Trump observers expected
  • when broadcaster Rush Limbaugh died, Trump resumed his old habit of calling into TV networks, with two calls to Fox and one call each to Newsmax and One America News.
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  • Lately Trump has been doing what comes naturally to him — dictating tweet-like statements, calling into conservative talk shows, and generally stirring up trouble. "I like this better than Twitter," he claimed on Newsmax. "Actually they did us a favor. This is better."
  • Trump has shown no courtesy to President Joe Biden since leaving the White House.
  • On the phone with one of his biggest sycophants, Newsmax's Greg Kelly, on Monday evening, Kelly speculated about Biden's mental faculties, prompting Trump to say "there's something" going on with Biden. Trump then questioned "whether or not he understands what he's signing" when bills cross his desk.
  • Trump is the first US president to lose re-election in nearly thirty years.
  • Trump, of course, proudly stands as the GOP antithesis of Bush 41. President 45, as some of his allies now call him, lest they identify him as "former," was uncharacteristically quiet upon leaving the White House. But he set up an office in Florida within days and began issuing statements that were widely picked up by the media — a cheap replacement for his account on Twitter, which banned him in the wake of the Capitol riot.
  • "The code of the presidents club is to get out of the way and let the new commander in chief have a year or two," CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said.
  • Since then, he has gradually increased his visibility, with emails to members of the media from "45 Office" so far in March, twice as many as in February
  • "Trump's unique in that he wants to make a lot of racket and garner attention after leaving the White House,"
  • Trump said "people have seen some silence" from him, "but actually, if you take a look at what's happened over the last period of time, we're sending out releases. They're getting picked up much better than any tweet."
  • Trump also teased plans for "our own platform,"
  • Trump told Boothe that he now believes official statements to the public are "much more elegant than a tweet, and I think it gets picked up better. You're seeing that."
  • "Picked up" was the key phrase. The need for pickup — meaning attention from the American news media — is at the heart of Trump's post-presidential actions.
  • And he is continuing to push the incendiary claims that led up to the January 6 riot, about winning the 2020 election and Biden stealing it from him, despite pleas even from within his own party to stop lying.
  • Trump seemed self-aware about his media approach during a podcast taping with Lisa Boothe, which was released on Monday morning. Trump was Boothe's inaugural guest — which means the podcast does not yet have a high profile or a massive following. Trump said in a statement that she has been doing "an outstanding job" on Fox, so perhaps he wanted to give her new podcast a boost.
  • Brinkley likened Trump to "an active political hand grenade, ready to blow up the US political system any way he can.
  • Last week Trump called into Fox for a live interview with Maria Bartiromo. The next day his comments to Bartiromo were in heavy rotation on other right-wing networks and outlets.
  • To Kelly, he hedged about the possibility of a new social platform, saying that "something will happen with social media if I want it to happen."
Javier E

How 'White Fragility' Talks Down to Black People - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...614146

racism white privilege review culture

shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • DiAngelo is an education professor and—most prominently today—a diversity consultant who argues that whites in America must face the racist bias implanted in them by a racist society. Their resistance to acknowledging this, she maintains, constitutes a “white fragility” that they must overcome in order for meaningful progress on both interpersonal and societal racism to happen
  • DiAngelo has convinced university administrators, corporate human-resources offices, and no small part of the reading public that white Americans must embark on a self-critical project of looking inward to examine and work against racist biases that many have barely known they had.
  • I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract
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  • Despite the sincere intentions of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us. This is unintentional, of course, like the racism DiAngelo sees in all whites
  • Still, the book is pernicious because of the authority that its author has been granted over the way innocent readers think.
  • she is devoted to endlessly exploring, acknowledging, and seeking to undo whites’ “complicity with and investment in” racism. To DiAngelo, any failure to do this “work,” as adherents of this paradigm often put it, renders one racist.
  • Her assumption that all people have a racist bias is reasonable—science has demonstrated it. The problem is what DiAngelo thinks must follow as the result of it.
  • DiAngelo has spent a very long time conducting diversity seminars in which whites, exposed to her catechism, regularly tell her—many while crying, yelling, or storming toward the exit—that she’s insulting them and being reductionist. Yet none of this seems to have led her to look inward.
  • Rather, she sees herself as the bearer of an exalted wisdom that these objectors fail to perceive, blinded by their inner racism.
  • When writers who are this sure of their convictions turn out to make a compelling case, it is genuinely exciting. This is sadly not one of those times
  • For one, DiAngelo’s book is replete with claims that are either plain wrong or bizarrely disconnected from reality.
  • DiAngelo’s depiction of white psychology shape-shifts according to what her dogma requires.
  • iAngelo also writes as if certain shibboleths of the Black left—for instance, that all disparities between white and Black people are due to racism of some kind—represent the incontestable truth.
  • The problem is that White Fragility is the prayer book for what can only be described as a cult.
  • We must consider what is required to pass muster as a non-fragile white person.
  • Refer to a “bad neighborhood,” and you’re using code for Black; call it a “Black neighborhood,” and you’re a racist; by DiAngelo’s logic, you are not to describe such neighborhoods at all, even in your own head.
  • You must not ask Black people about their experiences and feelings, because it isn’t their responsibility to educate you. Instead, you must consult books and websites. Never mind that upon doing this you will be accused of holding actual Black people at a remove, reading the wrong sources, or drawing the wrong lessons from them.
  • You must never cry in Black people’s presence as you explore racism, not even in sympathy, because then all the attention goes to you instead of Black people.
  • n 2020—as opposed to 1920—I neither need nor want anyone to muse on how whiteness privileges them over me.
  • That is a pretty strong charge to make against people who, according to DiAngelo, don’t even conceive of their own whiteness
  • if you are white, make no mistake: You will never succeed in the “work” she demands of you. It is lifelong, and you will die a racist just as you will die a sinner.
  • Whites aren’t even allowed to say, “I don’t feel safe.” Only Black people can say that.
  • She does stress that she is not dealing with a good/bad dichotomy and that your inner racist does not make you a bad person. But with racism limned as such a gruesome spiritual pollution, harbored by individuals moreover entrapped in a society within which they exert racism merely by getting out of bed, the issue of gray zones seems beside the point.
  • By the end, DiAngelo has white Americans muzzled, straitjacketed, tied down, and chloroformed for good measure—but for what?
  • herein is the real problem with White Fragility. DiAngelo does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching is necessary to forging change in society.
  • DiAngelo insists that “wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions’” is a “foundation of white fragility.” In other words, for DiAngelo, the whole point is the suffering. And note the scare quotes around solutions, as if wanting such a thing were somehow ridiculous.
  • A corollary question is why Black people need to be treated the way DiAngelo assumes we do. The very assumption is deeply condescending to all proud Black people.
  • In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would have been otherwise. Nor should anyone dismiss me as a rara avis. Being middle class, upwardly mobile, and Black has been quite common during my existence since the mid-1960s, and to deny this is to assert that affirmative action for Black people did not work.
  • If you object to any of the “feedback” that DiAngelo offers you about your racism, you are engaging in a type of bullying “whose function is to obscure racism, protect white dominance, and regain white equilibrium.”
  • Nor do I need wider society to undergo teachings in how to be exquisitely sensitive about my feelings.
  • I cannot imagine that any Black readers could willingly submit themselves to DiAngelo’s ideas while considering themselves adults of ordinary self-regard and strength. Few books about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly authoritative tome.
  • DiAngelo preaches that Black History Month errs in that it “takes whites out of the equation”—which means that it doesn’t focus enough on racism. Claims like this get a rise out of a certain kind of room, but apparently DiAngelo wants Black History Month to consist of glum recitations of white perfidy.
  • The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.
  • DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking.
  • Or simply dehumanized us.
  • John McWhorter is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He teaches linguistics at Columbia University, hosts the podcast Lexicon Valley, and is the author, most recently, of Words on the Move.
Javier E

(39) BuzzFeed and the Death of Social Media News - 0 views

thetriad.thebulwark.com/...zzfeed-and-the-death-of-social

media aggregation network effects

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • Charles Fishman’s book, The Wal-Mart Effect, you should. Like, right now. It’s an incredibly powerful story not just about the specific power of Wal-Mart, but about the general power of aggregation in networks.
  • If you are a company that sells pickles, and Wal-Mart comes to you and offers to sell your pickle jars, that seems very good for your business.
  • The problem is that Wal-Mart is an activist retailer—they are constantly pressuring their suppliers to lower prices. Sometimes their demands of suppliers lead to helpful innovations:
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  • But sometimes Wal-Mart’s demands are catastrophic for suppliers.
  • Why did these suppliers go along with Wal-Mart’s demands? Because Wal-Mart was such a large portion of their sales that they had no choice. Once your product is being sold in Wal-Mart, you cannot afford for it not to be sold in Wal-Mart. If you walk away from Wal-Mart, there is no alternate retail pathway on which to unload the excess volume you now make.
  • As one CEO told Fishman for his book, the experience of agreeing to let Wal-Mart sell his company’s product was like getting in bed with the mafia. He got squeezed and squeezed until his business died.
  • As an economic matter, Wal-Mart and Facebook are the same. Both are aggregators. Wal-Mart of retail products; Facebook of content
  • They need suppliers in the aggregate—they need goods on the shelves and articles in the feed. But if any specific supplier (your pickle company, BuzzFeed News) goes out of business—that doesn’t matter to them. Because there are a million others waiting to take their place.
  • And that is the story of the social media age of news.
  • One of the things these media outlets learned over the last decade is that while they evolved so that they needed Facebook in order to survive, Facebook didn’t need them. At all.
  • The fundamental problem with aggregators in the news business is that the publications themselves are supposed to be the aggregator.
  • What is the New York Times, or the Atlantic, or The Bulwark, but an aggregation of news content? Once you, as a publication, disaggregate your content so that other platforms can aggregate it along with content from everywhere else, then you have begun to give away your economic power.
  • The goal for media companies is to titrate the optimal point where your institution allows enough disaggregation of content to seed wider interest in the whole—but not so much that it gives away the greatest part of its economic power.
  • The key concept is that every media organization should see itself as a platform. Which means prioritizing a direct relationship with the audience over everything else.
  • That’s the future of the media business. Period.
  • That’s what podcasts are.3 People tend to think about podcasting as an alternate form of radio, but that's not right. A podcast is a direct feed from creator to listener that prevents the station manager or the network executive from aggregating the creator's work with others'.
  • That’s what the New York Times and the Atlantic have done by prioritizing their subscription audiences and getting away from Facebook.
  • And that’s what Substack and the newsletter revolution is.4
  • One of the reasons I like Substack is that the company has positioned itself as a utility and not an aggregator. This choice explains why Substack is good for publishers, but has never really been a darling of the VC world. It’s hard to be a unicorn as a utility. (Though it can be done; see Stripe.)
Javier E

Europe's energy crisis may get a lot worse - 0 views

messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/...oakv2

energy crisis europe policy politics economics

shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • It was only at the end of April that Russia cut gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, the first two victims of its energy-pressure campaign. But overall gas shipments are at less than one-third the level they were just a year ago. In mid-June, shipments through Nord Stream 1 were cut by 75 percent; in July, they were cut again.
  • “It is wartime,” Tatiana Mitrova, a research fellow at Columbia, told her colleague Jason Bordoff, a former adviser to Barack Obama, on an eye-opening recent episode of the podcast “Columbia Energy Exchange.”
  • I think there’s been a gradual and growing recognition that we are headed into the worst global energy crisis at least since the 1970s and perhaps longer than that.
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  • “This is something that European politicians and consumers didn’t want to admit for quite a long time. It sounds terrible, but that’s the reality. In wartime the economy is mobilized. The decisions are made by the governments, not by the free market. This is the case for Europe this winter,” she said, adding that we may see forced rationing, price controls, the suspension of energy markets and shutdowns of whole industrial sectors. “We are not actually talking about extremely high prices, but we are talking about physical absence of energy resources in certain parts of Europe.”
  • I think you would see Russia continue to restrict gas exports and maybe cut them off completely to Europe — and a very cold winter. I think a combination of those two things would mean sky-high energy prices.
  • Europe has been finding all the supplies that it can, but governments are realizing that’s not going to be sufficient. There are going to have to be efforts taken to curb demand as well and to prepare for the possibility of really severe energy rationing this winter.
  • If things become really severe this winter, I fear that you could see European countries start to look out for themselves rather than one another.
  • I think we could start to see governments saying, “Well, we’re going to restrict exports. We’re going to keep our energy at home.” Everyone starts to just look out for themselves, which I think would be exactly what Putin would hope for.
  • it would be wise to assume that Russia will use every opportunity it can to turn the screws on Europe.
  • It’s increasingly clear that Vladimir Putin is using gas as a weapon and trying to supply just enough gas to Europe to keep Europe in a perpetual state of panic about its ability to weather the coming winter.
  • governments will have to ration energy supplies and decide what’s important.
  • Since Russia invaded Ukraine and maybe until very recently, I’ve had the sense that the European public and the public beyond Europe, as well as policymakers, have been a little bit sleepwalking into a looming crisis.
  • here was some unrealistic optimism about how quickly Europe could do without Russian gas. And we took too long to confront seriously just how bad the numbers would look if the worst came to pass.
  • I think there was continued skepticism that Putin would really cut the gas supply. “It might be declining. It might be a little bit lower,” people thought. “But he’s not really going to shut off the supply.” And I think now everyone’s recognizing that’s a real possibility.
  • Putin has the ability to do a lot of damage to the global economy — and himself, to be sure — if he cuts oil exports as well.
  • There’s no extra oil supply in the world at all, as OPEC Plus reminded everyone by saying: No, we’re not going to be increasing production much, and we can’t even if we wanted to.
  • For all the talk about high gasoline prices and the rhetoric of Putin’s energy price hike, Russia’s oil exports have not fallen very much. If that were to happen — either because the U.S. and Europe forced oil to come off the market to put economic pressure on Putin or because he takes the oil off the market to hurt all of us — oil prices go up enormously.
  • That’s because there’s just no extra supply out there today at all. There’s a very little extra supply that the Saudis and the Emiratis can put on the market. And that’s about it. We’ve used the strategic petroleum reserve, and that’s coming to an end in the next several months.
  • it depends how much he takes off the market. We don’t know exactly. If Russia were to cut its oil exports completely, the prices would just skyrocket — to hundreds of dollars a barrel, I think.
  • We’re heading into a winter where markets might simply not be able to work anymore as the instrument by which you determine supply and demand.
  • if prices just soar to uncontrollable levels, markets are not going to work anymore. You’re going to need governments to step in and decide who gets the scarce energy supplies — how much goes to heating homes, how much goes to industry. There’s going to be a pecking order of different industries, where some industries are deemed more important to the economy than others.
  • a lot of governments in Europe are putting in place those kinds of emergency plans right now.
  • if the worst comes to pass, governments will, by necessity, step in to say: Homes get the natural gas, and parts of industry get dumped. Probably they would set price caps on energy or massively subsidize it. So it’s going to be very painful.
  • Worryingly for the European economy, this may mean that factories that can’t switch fuels will go dormant.
  • Today, before winter comes, gas prices in Europe are around $60 per million British thermal units. That compares to around $7 to $8 here in the United States
  • if the worst comes to pass, the market, as a mechanism, simply won’t work. The market will break. The prices will go too high. There’s just not enough energy for the market to balance at a certain price.
  • don’t forget, the amount of liquid natural gas that Europe is importing today — Asia is competing for those shipments. What happens if the Asia winter is very bad? What happens if China and others are willing to pay very high prices for it?
  • I think we’re in a multiyear potential energy crisis.
  • one thing that hasn’t gotten enough attention and that I worry most about is the impact this is having on emerging markets and the developing economies, because it is an interconnected market. When Europe is competing to buy L.N.G. at very high prices, not to mention Asia, that means if you’re in Pakistan or Bangladesh or lower-income countries, you’re really struggling to afford it. You’re just priced out of the market for natural gas — and coal. Coal is incredibly expensive now,
  • I think that that is a real potential humanitarian crisis, as a ripple effect of what’s happening in Europe right now.
  • right now, the price of gas in Europe is about four times what it was last year. Russia has cut flows to Europe by two-thirds but is earning the same revenue as it did last year. So Putin is not being hurt by the loss of gas exports to Europe. Europe’s being hurt by that.
  • this situation could last for several years.
  • Could the energy crisis bring about a change of heart, in which European countries withdraw some of their support or even begin to pressure Ukraine to negotiate a settlement? Is it possible that could even happen in advance of this winter?
  • you would imagine that, over time, when you don’t see Ukraine on the front page each and every day, eventually people’s attention wanes a bit and at a certain point the economic pain of high energy prices or other economic harms from the conflict reach a point where support may start to fracture a bit.
  • Whether that reaches a point where you start to see the West put pressure on Ukraine to capitulate, I think we’re pretty far away from that now, because everyone recognizes how outrageous and unacceptable Putin’s conduct is.
Javier E

Russell Brand on revolution: "We no longer have the luxury of tradition" - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...russell-brand-on-revolution

revolution activism conservativism crisis politics spiritual

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
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  • The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.
  • This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Biomechanically we are individuals, clearly. On the most obvious frequency of our known sensorial reality we are independent anatomical units. So we must take care of ourselves. But with our individual survival ensured there is little satisfaction to be gained by enthroning and enshrining ourselves as individuals.
  • For me the solution has to be primarily spiritual and secondarily political.
  • By spiritual I mean the acknowledgement that our connection to one another and the planet must be prioritised. Buckminster Fuller outlines what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: “to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone”. This maxim is the very essence of “easier said than done” as it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By teatime.
  • The price of privilege is poverty. David Cameron said in his conference speech that profit is “not a dirty word”. Profit is the most profane word we have. In its pursuit we have forgotten that while individual interests are being met, we as a whole are being annihilated. The reality, when not fragmented through the corrupting lens of elitism, is we are all on one planet.
  • Suffering of this magnitude affects us all. We have become prisoners of comfort in the absence of meaning. A people without a unifying myth. Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist, says our global problems are all due to the lack of relevant myths.
Javier E

'The Half Has Never Been Told,' by Edward E. Baptist - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-told-by-edward-e-baptist.html

slavery capitalism us history exceptionalism

shared by Javier E on 04 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • the history of American capitalism has emerged as a thriving cottage industry. This new work portrays capitalism not as a given (something that “came in the first ships,” as the historian Carl Degler once wrote) but as a system that developed over time, has been constantly evolving and penetrates all aspects of society.
  • Slavery plays a crucial role in this literature. For decades, historians depicted the institution as unprofitable and on its way to extinction before the Civil War (a conflict that was therefore unnecessary).
  • cotton, the raw material of the early Industrial Revolution, was by far the most important commodity in 19th-century international trade and that capital accumulated through slave labor flowed into the coffers of Northern and British bankers, merchants and manufacturers. And far from being economically backward, slave owners pioneered advances in modern accounting and finance.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The sellers of slaves, Baptist insists, were not generally paternalistic owners who fell on hard times and parted reluctantly with members of their metaphorical plantation “families,” but entrepreneurs who knew an opportunity for gain when they saw one. As for the slave traders — the middlemen — they excelled at maximizing profits. They not only emphasized the labor abilities of those for sale (reinforced by humiliating public inspections of their bodies), but appealed to buyers’ salacious fantasies. In the 1830s, the term “fancy girl” began to appear in slave-trade notices to describe young women who fetched high prices because of their physical attractiveness. “Slavery’s frontier,” Baptist writes, “was a white man’s sexual playground.”
  • After the legal importation of slaves from outside the country ended in 1808, the spread of slavery into the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico would not have been possible without the enormous uprooting of people from Maryland and Virginia. Almost one million slaves, Baptist estimates, were transported to the cotton fields from the Upper South in the decades before the Civil War.The domestic slave trade was highly organized and economically efficient, relying on such modern technologies as the steamboat, railroad and telegraph. For African-Americans, its results were devastating. Since buyers preferred young workers “with no attachments,” the separation of husbands from wives and parents from children was intrinsic to its operation, not, as many historians have claimed, a regrettable side effect.
  • The cotton kingdom that arose in the Deep South was incredibly brutal. Violence against Native Americans who originally owned the land, competing imperial powers like Spain and Britain and slave rebels solidified American control of the Gulf states. Violence, Baptist contends, explains the remarkable increase of labor productivity on cotton plantations. Without any technological innovations in cotton picking, output per hand rose dramatically between 1800 and 1860. Some economic historians have attributed this to incentives like money payments for good work and the opportunity to rise to skilled positions. Baptist rejects this explanation.
  • Slavery was essential to American development and, indeed, to the violent construction of the capitalist world in which we live.
  • Planters called their method of labor control the “pushing system.” Each slave was assigned a daily picking quota, which increased steadily over time. Baptist, who feels that historians too often employ circumlocutions that obscure the horrors of slavery, prefers to call it “the ‘whipping-machine’ system.” In fact, the word we should really use, he insists, is “torture.” To make slaves work harder and harder, planters utilized not only incessant beating but forms of discipline familiar in our own time — sexual humiliation, bodily mutilation, even waterboarding. In the cotton kingdom, “white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.”
  • in the 1830s Southern banks developed new financial instruments, bonds with slaves as collateral, that enabled planters to borrow enormous amounts of money to acquire new land, and how lawmakers backed these bonds with the state’s credit. A speculative bubble ensued, and when it collapsed, taxpayers were left to foot the bill. But rather than bailing out Northern and European bondholders, several states simply defaulted on their debts. Many planters fled with their slaves to Texas, until 1845 an independent republic, to avoid creditors. “Honor,” a key element in Southern notions of masculinity, went only so far.
  • As the railroad opened new areas to cultivation and cotton output soared, slave owners saw themselves as a modern, successful part of the world capitalist economy. They claimed the right to bring their slaves into all the nation’s territories, and indeed into free states. These demands aroused intense opposition in the North, leading to Lincoln’s election, secession and civil war.
  • It is hardly a secret that slavery is deeply embedded in our nation’s history. But many Americans still see it as essentially a footnote, an exception to a dominant narrative of the expansion of liberty on this continent.
  • Where Baptist breaks new ground is in his emphasis on the centrality of the interstate trade in slaves to the regional and national economies and his treatment of the role of extreme violence in the workings of the slave system.
  • ArtsBeat Book Review Podcast: Walter Isaacson’s ‘The Innovators’
Javier E

Simon & Schuster to Sell Online Courses Taught by Popular Authors - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...taught-by-popular-authors.html

publishing media

shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • book sales have flagged. Simon & Schuster’s sales fell 11 percent in the third fiscal quarter of last year. Sales of digital content, which accounted for 28 percent of the company’s sales, were flat.
  • Simon & Schuster also recently announced plans to feature some of its authors on podcasts on Play.it, a new podcast network from CBS, the publisher’s parent company.
  • Simon & Schuster plans to release 12 to 15 more courses this year, and is focusing on writers who have established, dedicated fan bases and a well-defined philosophy or message to deliver. Eventually, the online courses, which are planned as stand-alone products rather than supplements to books, could include videos by entertainers and experts who have not yet published books.
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  • Authors will be able to set their own prices. Dr. Agus, whose course is titled “A Short Guide to A Long Life,” decided to make his classes cost the same as a typical co-pay for a doctor’s office visit: $25.
Javier E

Why Is Jordan Peterson So Popular? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...567110

identity whitelash male character

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • The young men voted for Hillary, they called home in shock when Trump won, they talked about flipping the House, and they followed Peterson to other podcasts—to Sam Harris and Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan
  • What they were getting from these lectures and discussions, often lengthy and often on arcane subjects, was perhaps the only sustained argument against identity politics they had heard in their lives.
  • With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology
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  • The alarms sounded when Peterson published what quickly became a massive bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, because books are something that the left recognizes as drivers of culture.
  • it was difficult to attack the work on ideological grounds, because it was an apolitical self-help book that was at once more literary and more helpful that most, and that was moreover a commercial success. All of this frustrated the critics. It’s just common sense! they would say,
  • As with Peterson’s podcasts and videos, the audience is made up of people who are busy with their lives—folding laundry, driving commercial trucks on long hauls, sitting in traffic from cubicle to home, exercising. This book was putting words to deeply held feelings that many of them had not been able to express before.
  • There is an eagerness to attach reputation-destroying ideas to him, such as that he is a supporter of something called “enforced monogamy,”
  • t is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind.
  • What he refuses to do is to abide by any laws that could require compelled speech.
  • there is no coherent reason for the left’s obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. What, then, accounts for it?
  • the endlessly repeated falsehood that he believes that the government should be in the business of arranging marriages. There is also the inaccurate belief that he refuses to refer to transgender people by the gendered pronoun conforming to their identity
  • In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true.
  • If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire; and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming
  • All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas.
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