The Writer of the Future
books.substack.com
The Writer of the Future
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Re: The Writer of the Future
#2Interesting.
But they want $45 for a one-year subscription to get book reviews. I have a hard time parsing that. Maybe if I were seriously into literary matters. Also, I can't see what forms of payment they accept, unless I provide an email address. Probably not Bitcoin, I'm guessing.
Re: The Writer of the Future
#3Interesting. But they want $45 for a one-year subscription to get book reviews. I have a hard time parsing that. Maybe if I were seriously into literary matters. Also, I can't see what forms of payment they accept, unless I provide an email address. Probably not Bitcoin, I'm guessing.
I'm still catching up on the last ( glances over at the three-volume Lichtheim ) 5000ish years of literature. I don't expect to be even half done before I'm dead. I can't imagine wanting or needing to know about new releases so badly I'd pay to receive frequent book reviews, unless I were in the industry.
[EDIT] also the author's misunderstood some things here:
> Information, said the pioneers of digital reading, wants to be free.
> [....]
> the axiom that information means to be free determined that the economy of digital media would be based on advertising.
That's not really what that meant, and whatever actual dedication to information freedom that's manifested in tech circles has nothing whatsoever to do with advertising taking over the web.
Re: The Writer of the Future
#4Interesting. But they want $45 for a one-year subscription to get book reviews. I have a hard time parsing that. Maybe if I were seriously into literary matters. Also, I can't see what forms of payment they accept, unless I provide an email address. Probably not Bitcoin, I'm guessing.
I'm still catching up on the last ( glances over at the three-volume Lichtheim ) 5000ish years of literature. I don't expect to be even half done before I'm dead. I can't imagine wanting or needing to know about new releases so badly I'd pay to receive frequent book reviews, unless I were in the industry. [EDIT] also the author's misunderstood some things here: > Information, said the pioneers of digital reading, wan…
Yeah, that jump surprised me too.
I clearly remember the first online ads. And there was nothing ideological about it.
Re: The Writer of the Future
#5Interesting. But they want $45 for a one-year subscription to get book reviews. I have a hard time parsing that. Maybe if I were seriously into literary matters. Also, I can't see what forms of payment they accept, unless I provide an email address. Probably not Bitcoin, I'm guessing.
> Maybe if I were seriously into literary matters.
Like the subscribers to the London Review of Books ($49 US / year), the New York Review of Books ($89 US / year), or the LA Review of Books? ($100 US / year for a quarterly, if I'm not mistaken).
There are lots of people who are serious enough about books to pay these kinds of prices, and the price they're asking is around market (though maybe a little high for digital only).
My question is this: Are they as good as these other very famous publications?
Re: The Writer of the Future
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm still catching up on the last ( glances over at the three-volume Lichtheim ) 5000ish years of literature. I don't expect to be even half done before I'm dead. I can't imagine wanting or needing to know about new releases so badly I'd pay to receive frequent book reviews, unless I were in the industry. [EDIT] also the author's misunderstood some things here: > Information, said the pioneers of digital reading, wan…
Yeah, that jump surprised me too. I clearly remember the first online ads. And there was nothing ideological about it.
Isn’t the point here that it was the path the free information ideology inadvertently produced: (free) information served with ads (because everyone needs butter on the bread)? And because of that ingrained ideology, it’s still difficult to charge for the actual information product?
Edit: missing word
Re: The Writer of the Future
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that jump surprised me too. I clearly remember the first online ads. And there was nothing ideological about it.
Isn’t the point here that it was the path the free information ideology inadvertently produced: (free) information served with ads (because everyone needs butter on the bread)? And because of that ingrained ideology, it’s still difficult to charge for the actual information product? Edit: missing word
That ideology had nothing to do with the use of spying coupled with advertising ("targeted ads" in their modern sense) causing the creation of rents-seeking monopolies in the online ads space. The tech that enabled that was really just a few things (Javascript that could make and modify requests while also being able to hook into various user-generated events being a huge one, though not the only one) and I don't think many or any of those were developed for the purposes of information freedom or whatever, in particular.
And anyway "information wants to be free" is more descriptive than it is ideological. It's a statement about what tends to happen to information. Cheap Internet access and cheap storage have changed how that works so much that it's qualitatively different from the previous status quo ("the medium is the message") but the tech creating that would've probably looked pretty similar regardless of whether the inventors thought it was wrong to pay for information (which I doubt most did anyway).
[EDIT] TL;DR: "information wants to be free" isn't a statement about the ethics of charging money for information, and the reasons that advertising won on the web and the reasons monopolies took those over rather than even small or midsized publications being able to continue getting by with their own ad sales desk wouldn't have anything to do with anyone subscribing to that notion anyway. It's an entirely incorrect association.
Re: The Writer of the Future
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t the point here that it was the path the free information ideology inadvertently produced: (free) information served with ads (because everyone needs butter on the bread)? And because of that ingrained ideology, it’s still difficult to charge for the actual information product? Edit: missing word
That ideology had nothing to do with the use of spying coupled with advertising ("targeted ads" in their modern sense) causing the creation of rents-seeking monopolies in the online ads space. The tech that enabled that was really just a few things (Javascript that could make and modify requests while also being able to hook into various user-generated events being a huge one, though not the only one) and I don't thi…
Right. Ads don't generate substantial income for the book authors. And TFA actually complains about that, as the context for bringing up the supposed flow from "information wants to be free" to ads.
But now that I think of it, ads do reflect the fact that "information wants to be free". But in this case, it's information about users, which gets monetized through behavioral advertising markets.
Re: The Writer of the Future
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
That ideology had nothing to do with the use of spying coupled with advertising ("targeted ads" in their modern sense) causing the creation of rents-seeking monopolies in the online ads space. The tech that enabled that was really just a few things (Javascript that could make and modify requests while also being able to hook into various user-generated events being a huge one, though not the only one) and I don't thi…
Right. Ads don't generate substantial income for the book authors. And TFA actually complains about that, as the context for bringing up the supposed flow from "information wants to be free" to ads. But now that I think of it, ads do reflect the fact that "information wants to be free". But in this case, it's information about users, which gets monetized through behavioral advertising markets.
Yeah my point is just that 1) "information wants to be free" is an observation more than a statement of purpose, and 2) I don't think fighting against dirty ol' authors who are trying to charge for their work was on anyone's mind, more or less, when designing the technologies under the modern Web. The way things shook out was some combination of an accident and inevitable. I doubt many or any of them thought charging money for, say, books or magazines was a bad thing. That's just... not what any of this is about.
Even if the Free Software movement (which I think is what she's trying to get at?) sometimes bleeds over into other areas, its ideological roots are in retaining user control of software in particular because software's a tool, not keeping people from charging money for novels or history books or newspaper articles or whatever.
[EDIT] that is, actual ideological informational-freedom anarchists—that is, not just opportunistic pirates—are rare and aren't and have never been in power to any substantial degree, even in the software world. The whole premise of that part is a big misunderstanding.
Re: The Writer of the Future
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Ads don't generate substantial income for the book authors. And TFA actually complains about that, as the context for bringing up the supposed flow from "information wants to be free" to ads. But now that I think of it, ads do reflect the fact that "information wants to be free". But in this case, it's information about users, which gets monetized through behavioral advertising markets.
Yeah my point is just that 1) "information wants to be free" is an observation more than a statement of purpose, and 2) I don't think fighting against dirty ol' authors who are trying to charge for their work was on anyone's mind, more or less, when designing the technologies under the modern Web. The way things shook out was some combination of an accident and inevitable . I doubt many or any of them thought chargin…
Well, as an old-school "ideological informational-freedom anarchist", "information wants to be free" for me was always mostly about the Internet as a workaround against censorship, and domination via propaganda.