Every monopoly eventually succumbs to competition and ultimately become a ward of the state.
At least, that is a pet theory.
Railroads were the original American monopoly.
Railroads dominated not only transportation, but agriculture and the political system (every state legislature was supposedly on their payroll).
Today, AmTrak represents what survives of passenger rail in the USA.
The domination by the railroads was the great formative experience in American history that shaped how Americans think about economic power and centralization.
The thinking on monopolies might have always been wrongheaded.
Monopolies might not last as long as the public fears.
For example, Ford had a “monopoly” on the mass production of automobiles which it soon lost to General Motors.
Also, thinking on monopolies might have been increasingly misapplied as the economy evolved.
There seems to be a desire to break up “monopolies” in areas that were always insignificant, and which would evolve to become even less central to American life.
For example, federal legislators seek to block content producers from owning distribution.
Hence, in 1948, the government banned the ownership of movie theaters by film studios.
The ban was terminated in 2019.
But did that ban even make sense back when it was enacted in 1948?
Movie attendance had already entered a long, steep decline just a few years prior in 1945.
A graph from the UK illustrates how the decline of theaters is inversely related to the rise of television.
https://47bus.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/cinemagraph.jpg
It could be that American politicians mobilize to dismantle monopolies just when those technologies are already on the verge of obsolescence.
There has been a lot of talk that the big FAANG tech companies — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google — are monopolies that need to be broken up.
That might signify an important historical turning point.
It might mean that these tech companies are on the verge of obsolescence anyway or will soon face fierce competition.
It might also means that policy makers and the public completely misunderstand the big tech companies in describing them as monopolies.
That, in turn, means that the correct kind of regulation is not being pursued.
For example, take Amazon.
Since the Covid pandemic began, everyone has been ordering items daily from Amazon.
Indeed, half of all online orders in the USA are now through Amazon.
It is said that this is proof that Amazon is a monopoly.
But every company today sells online.
Therefore, Amazon’s dominance does not seem to be based on an incumbent’s technological advantages that inhibit competitors from entering the market.
That is, just because Amazon is extremely convenient and has a strong reputation does not make it a monopoly.
Amazon’s biggest market share is in retail.
Amazon controls about 5% of retail in the USA.
Again, that does not sound like a monopoly.
In sum, being a seller in a market closed off to other sellers — that is, being a monopoly — does not describe Amazon.
The problem with Amazon is precisely the opposite.
Amazon is too open.
Amazon is the cyberspace version of The Old West.
Amazon is guilty of:
- selling defective products that maim and kill customers with no accountability.
- selling counterfeit products despite all manner of complaint.
- money laundering (e.g., criminals selling non-existent books to themselves, each for thousands of dollars).
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/whos-liable-for-defective-products-sold-on-amazon/
Amazon is not in any way a monopoly that should be dismantled.
Rather, Amazon is an online department store pretending to be a “platform” on which other people’s operations are run independently.
If this sort of ruthless, criminal and unaccountable form of trade is what characterizes platforms, then platforms are evil and must be taken down.
Therefore, if Amazon insists on calling itself a platform, then Amazon should be eliminated altogether.
Overnight, another company will take its place.
Facebook is even worse.
Is Facebook a monopoly?
Facebook’s user statistics suggest that Facebook is comparable in status to Coca Cola.
That is, Facebook is the classic, familiar, conventional “all-American” standard that is ubiquitous and of consistent quality, and which continues to grow in popularity globally.
But this makes Facebook, like Coke, appear to be lame and uncool in the eyes of youth.
Half of all teenagers in the USA do not use Facebook.
Facebook and Coke are thus vulnerable to competition from a plethora of alternatives that are savvy enough to market themselves as weird or radical (Dr. Pepper, Snapchat).
If one goes to a party or restaurant or nightclub, inevitably, there will be the obligatory Pepsi and diet Coke in stock.
But at home, people drink all kinds of alternatives to Coke and Pepsi that are more interesting (or, at least, seem more interesting).
Likewise, Facebook can be described as quasi-mandatory but existing alongside an array of heterodox alternatives that are consumed alongside of it.
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/facebook-stats-for-marketers/
Facebook might have a dominant presence in social media, but that does not make it a classic monopoly.
In fact, Facebook is worse than a monopoly.
Facebook is an unregulated newspaper pretending to be a “platform”.
In the USA, newspapers are meant to be highly regulated.
In the USA, the private realm is open and remarkably unregulated, whereas the public realm — especially the government, which is purely public — is highly regulated.
In fact, in order to constrain the power of government, the pure public realm of American government is by design a frustrating, inefficient system.
For example, the US government is articulated into three branches — executive, legislative, judicial — that are tasked with policing each other.
As part of the public realm, newspapers in the USA are likewise highly regulated, although not as much as government agencies.
For example, the official Twitter account of the US White House is very strictly limited in usage by the government.
The private realm, by comparison, is much freer and, in fact, can seem way out of control.
For example, the private Twitter account of the President is regulated in content only by Twitter, which is quite tolerant of what is allowed.
As a disguised newspaper, Facebook should be completely eliminated if it continues to insist on operating as — that is, pretending to be — a platform in the public, political realm.
Platforms that host users anonymously engage in a false form of openness.
For example, newspapers require(d) readers who submitted letters to the editor to supply a phone number in order to confirm their identity.
Confirming an identity is a genuine form of transparency.
But the rhetoric of “total openness” propagated by the billionaire owners of social media derives from a romantic view that all discourse must be liberated.
Moreover, romantic idealism is encouraged by the private elite universities where the billionaire social media plutocrats were educated.
Private elite universities like Harvard desire applicants who are
- technically brilliant,
- high achieving,
- inconceivably ambitious,
- passionately idealistic,
- well-versed in critical discourse and learning, but
- devoid of critical reflection.
Harvard’s admissions office is an adjunct of the Harvard endowment.
Harvard is a self-perpetuating organism that seeks the best and brightest — at the graduate level.
At the undergraduate level, Harvard wants people who are going to rule the world and who will donate phenomenal amounts of money to Harvard.
The Harvard undergraduate’s passionate idealism serves to turbocharge his or her ruthless ambition.
Harvard’s idealism reflects the history of the Protestant ethic to morally transform a degraded world in contrast to the Catholic monastic ethos of escape from a world of sin.
Indeed, Harvard was the quintessential elite training ground of Calvinist theology.
Calvinism itself is an elitist religious faith in that it maintains that salvation is a matter of predestined grace, and so the display of wealth is a sign of moral rectitude.
Eventually, the Calvinist faith evaporated, but the habits of frugality and industry and the idea that wealth reflects virtue persisted and fed the development of modern American capitalism.
Likewise, one finds a similar evolution in the thinking of elite-educated owners of social media.
Silicon Valley self-righteously preached disruption until about 2010, when social media played a crucial role in the Arab Spring rebellions in northern Africa.
The Arab Spring was the test case for Silicon Valley’s romantic ideology of disruption as liberation from monopolies of political power.
It turned out that the rebels in did not want democracy, they wanted a more honest — and more strict — form of dictatorship.
It was was like a flashback to the invasion of Iraq, which was itself a romantic project dreamed up by over-educated neoconservatives pretending to be realists.
The response from Silicon Valley was not to reform social media, but for the tech billionaires to buy estates in New Zealand for fear of an American insurrection — against themselves.
The old faith in disruption disappeared overnight, but the capitalist juggernaut just kept chugging along.
Indeed, Facebook very obviously engages in treason for profit, and this goes on for years and years without Facebook even slightly modifying its policies.
There is a saying about psychiatry that “a neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air, a psychotic is the man who lives in it, and a psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.”
There is a similar unholy trinity of constituencies who have created, inhabited and financially exploited the pseudo-openness of social media:
- Hacker culture has become the host for a romantic ideology of TOTAL LIBERATION OF EVERYTHING (Assange), and this is the background music of the tech industry.
- Uneducated authoritarian tribal populists have come into their own with social media.
- Private elite universities seek to recruit passionate, ambitious Stakhanovites who will, once they become plutocrats, eventually replenish the universities’ coffers.
Americans don’t seem to understand that the problem is not closedness (monopoly), but openness itself — specifically, the pseudo-openness of so-called “platforms”.
Because of the American early experience with railroads and Standard Oil, Americans are biased toward open competition.
In fact, an extremely peculiar ethos of openness pervades American society.
Imagine a hypothetical presidential candidate who boasts to a complete stranger about how his hobby is walking up to women and assaulting them.
It’s an unusual hobby, and would be unusual for him to be proud of it (as opposed to Catholic priests, who at least feel guilty), and it would be unusual if he got elected after word got out.
But what is most unusual would be his striking openness and friendliness and sense of connection to a total stranger.
Sociopaths comprise about 1% to 4% of the population of every society, and so they are, statistically, an inevitability.
That is, it is somewhat rare to encounter individuals who are very callous, hostile, impulsive, irresponsible, deceitful, manipulative and impulsive, but eventually we do (lawyers).
However, very rarely do such individuals enthusiastically discuss their crimes when they chum around with strangers.
So, it’s not the evil that is so weird.
What is truly freakish is an extremely aggressive extroversion devoid of introspection, in which someone identified purely with their own outward appearance and persona.
To be sure, such a super-extrovert could otherwise be a very good and normal human being.
In fact, all of this person’s goodness would be manifest to all, projected outward onto the surface of his personality.
He would be genuinely likeable to all — although ultimately unknowable.
Such a person would have no inner turmoil or darkness, and this might imbue him with a certain likeability, trustworthiness and personal magnetism.
Strangely, even if he were a professional artist, he would also have no dynamism or creativity or “soul”.
It would be a profoundly unusual society that would produce such a person.
Even more unusual would be if that society came to worship him precisely because he had self-amputated his interior life to make way for a sunny, mindless public image.
Eliminating one’s own soul would be a strange variety of noble self-sacrifice that brought reassurance and comfort to a troubled nation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Wasn%27t_There_(2001_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Sacrifice_(song)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stepford_Wives_(1975_film)
The example of Ronald Reagan can serve to illuminate the paradox of American openness, which is at once completely sincere yet superficial.
Those who knew Ronald Reagan loved Ronald Reagan, and they swore that with Ronald Reagan, what you see is what you get.
However, they would point out that despite Reagan’s total sincerity, he was strangely remote and grew irritated with small talk, and he was only really comfortable around his wife.
There is a certain fetishization of “openness” in the USA that is manifest in the personality structure of Americans.
But in so many ways it is a very much a pseudo-openness.
“Pseudo-openness” might sound insincere, but here it refers to something entirely different that can be extremely sincere.
In Ronald Reagan’s case, this was the pseudo-openness of not hiding a secret interior because there is no longer an interior.
Everything that was on the inside is now on the outside, and what was not fit for public consumption was edited out and purged long ago.
Having been eliminated, traces of the inner self now only exist as a flat projection on a wall.
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4aac6314083b684ff27b9cb346ea979a.webp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cure_(film)
In almost every society, people define themselves by a network of relationships, beginning with carefully defined family roles that have specific titles (older sister, younger brother, etc.).
Human relationships are typically understood as a series of concentric circles moving outward:
- family
- close friends and allies
- friends
- acquaintances
- strangers
https://agileleanlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Relationship-circles-300×300.png
Now imagine a hypothetical society in which all of these boundaries are wiped out — or, more strangely, inverted.
In such a unusual society, the focus of social life would be in the following order:
- strangers
- acquaintances
- friends
- close friends
- family
That is, people would feel little connection to their own families but would instead feel a bond with strangers (for example, Facebook “friends”).
In fact, just as some people struggle with academic learning disabilities, there are those who have social learning disabilities.
They cannot distinguish between strangers and family.
Imagine a country with a population of hundreds of millions of people where the absence or inversion of boundaries was built into the culture.
Such a society would be so unreal by the standards of every other society that it would be as if the laws of physics had been altered.
For example, gravity pulls together objects that are close to one another, its force diminishing the further objects are from one another.
But there are at least three other forces at work in the universe.
This includes “strong interaction“, which maintains its force on objects regardless of how far they are from one another.
In the unusual hypothetical society, the force of gravity between close individuals disappears, to be replaced by strong interaction between infinitely distant individuals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_interaction#Behavior_of_the_strong_force
In nuclear physics and particle physics, the strong interaction is the mechanism responsible for the strong nuclear force, and is one of the four known fundamental interactions, with the others being electromagnetism, the weak interaction, and gravitation.
The strong force acts between quarks. Unlike all other forces (electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational), the strong force does not diminish in strength with increasing distance between pairs of quarks. After a limiting distance (about the size of a hadron) has been reached, it remains at a strength of about 10,000 newtons (N), no matter how much farther the distance between the quarks.
What kind of person would be an emblem for such a society?
A magnetic television or movie personality.
Ironically, personal scandal would make this celebrity even more relatable because their private life would be in public view, making them feel even more familiar.
After all, it was sex tapes that had found their way onto the internet that launched the improbable but fabulously lucrative celebrity careers of Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton.
Extreme openness would be a facet of such a society, to the admiration, fascination, amusement and horror of all other societies.
(“The Godfather part 2”, 1974, Michael asks his his mother how a man can lose his family)
Coupling this mandatory extroversion with malignant narcissism would produce a real piece of work.
But it gets weirder.
This combination of sociability and open narcissism is precisely what would make this person a popular celebrity beloved by his countrymen.
This would seem to be the case with the actor Alec Baldwin.
Alec Baldwin is a genuine egomaniac who became an even bigger star in the later stages of his career by making fun of himself.
Even at the personal level in daily life, Alec Baldwin regularly engages in genius-level self-parody that is itself a critical commentary on the nature of celebrity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/fashion/on-celebrities-good-and-bad-or-alec-baldwin.html
SOME years ago, I was standing behind Alec Baldwin at a party while talking with another writer, when the actor turned around and offered us a cigar with the most postmodern smile I have ever seen. “Have a petit robusto,” he said. He exaggerated the “eet” in “petit” ever so slightly, a delicate emphasis that had the effect of making comically explicit the absurdity of applying “petit” to “robusto.” When he got to the latter word, he pronounced “robusto” one syllable at a time — “Ro. Bus. Toe.” — with such ironic vigor that cigar, celebrity and offer collapsed into layers of self-parody. He was a famous actor playing a regular guy who was acknowledging the fatuity of being a celebrity even as he was savoring its every moment. You felt he really, genuinely, wanted to be liked, at the same time as he couldn’t have cared less whether you liked him or not.
Some celebrities are private, others are openly self-destructive.
Alec Baldwin stands alone in his Irish Catholic cycles of self-indulgent meltdowns followed by public repentance and self-examination.
The third category, I would argue, Mr. Baldwin invented and occupies alone. He is the celebrity who enjoys wealth, glamour and power, yet stumbles through them, commenting with insight and self-deprecating humor on his stumbling like an ordinary guy traveling through stations of the everyday cross: The frustrated message on his daughter’s voice mail. The rudeness toward the flight attendant. The altercation with the photographer. Since fame is now a universal obsession, we are interested in other people’s experience of fame the way we are interested in other people’s experience of affliction. It is therapeutic to see Mr. Baldwin stumble, and then good-naturedly mock himself, and this is why we repeatedly forgive him. He handles fame with humility. He is robusto, but also petit, the little big man. Even the envious, self-righteous furies on the Web couldn’t turn his trifling infractions into crimes.
Alec Baldwin’s self-effacing egotism is what assured his segue into comedy.
Mr. Baldwin, on the other hand, has become distinctive among American actors for making disdain for his on-screen persona part of his on-screen persona. This is why he is all the more believable as an actual person. Mr. Baldwin’s character on “30 Rock,” the deliciously, flamboyantly amoral television executive Jack Donaghy, is the reductio ad absurdum of all the many heavies he has played in his career, from a psychopathic ex-con, to a sadistic real estate salesman, to a glacial hit man, to a psychopathic Army officer and beyond — most portrayed by him with a cruel or perverse or fatal touch of humanity. Only a man with exquisitely tuned moral antennas could perform evil so fully, or become so aware of the profound sham of doing so that he explodes the whole project — playing evil for fun and profit — into sublime comic caricature. After Mr. Baldwin’s ego-busting tour-de-force as Donaghy, all that is left is silence. Someone once asked Mr. Baldwin what made actors like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman and others cool. Easy, he replied. They had read the script and knew that they win in the end, so they could afford to be unflappable. How refreshing to encounter an actor who draws the line where life begins and his professional kingdom of make-believe ends, and who sometimes trips over it, to boot.
Another actor who has won over audiences in his latter-day career by engaging in a comedic self-parody of his own self-importance is the Canadian actor William Shatner.
But Shatner was always gratefully perceived as having an exaggerated acting style because he provided so much spirit and heat to the character Captain Kirk on “Star Trek”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overacting
Guardian journalist Chris Michael, a proponent of overacting, said: “From Hugo Weaving‘s Agent Smith to Heath Ledger‘s Joker to the entire oeuvre of William Shatner, mannered or stylised acting is an underrated skill.”
As Shatner aged, his overacting came to be seen — to his surprise, delight and profit — as light comedy.
Shatner’s turn to self-parody is not, however, at the level of intellectual sophistication and moral penance as Alec Balwin’s.
The third celebrity who has thrived since the 1980s as a national self-parody of narcissism is Donald Trump.
Trump’s personal style imbues him with the aura of a self-made billionaire from the working class.
His lack of polish and learning, and thus the erroneous perception that he is of lowly origins, make his swagger seem ironic.
In a study of Trump rallies, there seems to be one maneuver that unintentionally wins over the audience’s affection:
- First, Trump recalls how he was attacked by one of his opponents, and Trump becomes self-pitying and defensive.
- Then Trump changes gears and, in a long rant, goes on the offensive and attacks the character of his opponent.
- Finally, exhausted, Trump sheepishly admits that there is some truth to the accusations or criticisms put forth by his opponent.
It has the effect of making Trump seem humorous, modest and boyish, and his performance is perceived as a comedy routine.
But far from joking around, Trump is often enraged and is “dancing to his own music” as he goes off on a tangent unrelated to politics, entirely disconnected from his audience.
Trump’s personal rage is contagious, and has the effect of riling up the entire audience, including neutral observers.
Trump’s frequent episodes of explosive anger and his inability to tolerate criticism (or even advice) suggests a deep-seated fear of abandonment rooted in early childhood.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/11/george-saunders-goes-to-trump-rallies
Why does Trump even hold rallies?
Trump earned $650 million from his TV show “The Apprentice”, the most money he ever earned from a single gig.
Trump thought that running for president would bring back his TV show, and he did not imagine that he would actually get elected.
Also, Trump enjoys his rallies even more than golf, referring to them as the “great Trump show”, a one-man circus in which he plays the lion tamer, the strong man and all the clowns.
Trump’s heart has always been in performance and theater.
For example, when the young Donald Trump came into a $400 million inheritance, he tried unsuccessfully to become a Broadway producer.
Behind the desire to perform is Trump’s extroversion and lack of social boundaries, which are exhibitionist in magnitude, and which compel Trump to pursue celebrity and politics.
Yet despite Trump’s total lack of emotional and social filters, Trump has been repeatedly described by those who work with him as totally unknowable.
Frustrated by this opacity, Trump’s ghost writer Tony Schwartz tried to get to know Trump by listening in on Trump’s phone calls.
What Schwartz found was a super-extroverted vortex of attention-seeking without any sort of interior, private, intimate self.
If Reagan illustrated the tragic aspect of American pseudo-openness, Trump exhibits its malignancy in full-blown form.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all
As Schwartz headed back to New York, though, he came up with another plan. He would propose eavesdropping on Trump’s life by following him around on the job and, more important, by listening in on his office phone calls. That way, extracting extended reflections from Trump would not be required. When Schwartz presented the idea to Trump, he loved it. Almost every day from then on, Schwartz sat about eight feet away from him in the Trump Tower office, listening on an extension of Trump’s phone line. Schwartz says that none of the bankers, lawyers, brokers, and reporters who called Trump realized that they were being monitored. The calls usually didn’t last long, and Trump’s assistant facilitated the conversation-hopping. While he was talking with someone, she often came in with a Post-it note informing him of the next caller on hold.
“He was playing people,” Schwartz recalls. On the phone with business associates, Trump would flatter, bully, and occasionally get mad, but always in a calculated way. Before the discussion ended, Trump would “share the news of his latest success,” Schwartz says. Instead of saying goodbye at the end of a call, Trump customarily signed off with “You’re the greatest!” There was not a single call that Trump deemed too private for Schwartz to hear. “He loved the attention,” Schwartz recalls. “If he could have had three hundred thousand people listening in, he would have been even happier.”
This year, Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in reserve for after the campaign. “There isn’t,” Schwartz insists. “There is no private Trump.” This is not a matter of hindsight. While working on “The Art of the Deal,” Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at Trump’s personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for public attention. “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’—recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular,” he observed, on October 21, 1986.
He saw Trump as driven not by a pure love of dealmaking but by an insatiable hunger for “money, praise, and celebrity.” Often, after spending the day with Trump, and watching him pile one hugely expensive project atop the next, like a circus performer spinning plates, Schwartz would go home and tell his wife, “He’s a living black hole!”
Schwartz told me that Trump’s need for attention is “completely compulsive,” and that his bid for the Presidency is part of a continuum. “He’s managed to keep increasing the dose for forty years,” Schwartz said. After he’d spent decades as a tabloid titan, “the only thing left was running for President. If he could run for emperor of the world, he would.”
Trump now seems to be in debt to the tune of $1.1 billion, although his worth has been estimated at $2.5 billion.
https://www.ft.com/content/448c69a6-18f3-4fa0-a3ad-50e8ce553e1e
There have been periods of Trump’s life where he spins out of control, says “yes” to every business proposal that comes his way, and goes heavily into debt.
The period during the 1980s when he hooked up with Marla Maples and his first marriage fells apart seems to have been such a time.
But, unbeknown to Schwartz and the public, by late 1987, when the book came out, Trump was heading toward what Barrett calls “simultaneous personal and professional self-destruction.” O’Brien agrees that during the next several years Trump’s life unravelled. The divorce from Ivana reportedly cost him twenty-five million dollars. Meanwhile, he was in the midst of what O’Brien calls “a crazy shopping spree that resulted in unmanageable debt.” He was buying the Plaza Hotel and also planning to erect “the tallest building in the world,” on the former rail yards that he had bought on the West Side. In 1987, the city denied him permission to construct such a tall skyscraper, but in “The Art of the Deal” he brushed off this failure with a one-liner: “I can afford to wait.” O’Brien says, “The reality is that he couldn’t afford to wait. He was telling the media that the carrying costs were three million dollars, when in fact they were more like twenty million.” Trump was also building a third casino in Atlantic City, the Taj, which he promised would be “the biggest casino in history.” He bought the Eastern Air Lines shuttle that operated out of New York, Boston, and Washington, rechristening it the Trump Shuttle, and acquired a giant yacht, the Trump Princess. “He was on a total run of complete and utter self-absorption,” Barrett says, adding, “It’s kind of like now.”
At the national level, the American cult of mandatory extroversion and pseudo-openness leads to economic dysfunction, even without the malignant narcissism.
That kind of extreme, even dysfunctional orientation toward pseudo-openness might be misapplied in the urge to promote competition in the face of perceived monopolies.
Again, the problem with so-called “monopolies” like Amazon and Facebook might be that they are too open.
It has been argued that Amazon has become an essential service during the coronavirus pandemic, and therefore Amazon should be made into a public utility or a government agency.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/17/amazon-coronavirus-public-utility-workers
Again, Amazon is better understood as an online department store that sells defective and counterfeit products, and that this should be the focus of regulation.
The time to turn Amazon into a utility would be farther off in the future, when Amazon finally becomes obsolete and a shadow of its former self.
A model for this would be Amtrak, which turns a profit in the densely populated northeastern USA but which requires a subsidy in rural areas.
Economists might oppose such subsidies, which are provided to Amtrak by Republican congressmen from rural states.
But without subsidies, economically obsolete rural areas would fall even further behind economically and fall even deeper into clutches of populist politicians.
One industry that was once dominant and which fell into obsolescence with the internet is local journalism.
The case will be made here that local journalism should be a utility.
Once upon a time, journalism was a local affair, and it was deeply biased along partisan lines.
However, the actual political life of the nation was pragmatic because local politics is based on money and the two main political parties were each ideologically diverse.
With economic development, newspapers became corporate and their orientation shifted from being editorially driven to being advertiser driven.
By the 1970s, only the power and independence of national newspapers could stand up to political authority, and this produced the golden age of American investigative journalism.
However, with national economic integration and the eclipsing of local politics, politics became less pragmatic and ideologically polarized, and political parties became more homogeneous.
Then along came the internet in the 1990s.
Silicon Valley’s self-righteous ideology of disruption — “Move fast and break things” — implies that it is national corporate monopolies that are vulnerable to technological innovation.
This hostility to perceived monopolies is, again, very American.
Interestingly, when the internet came for journalism, it turns out that David did not slay Goliath.
The advent of the internet did not destabilize corporate journalism at the national level but rather undermined local journalism.
At the local level, politics is all about money, and local investigative journalism followed the money.
The 21st century is the golden age of local corruption because of the diminution of local journalism.
The shift to national news also means that there has been a concomitant shift to polarizing ideologies that provide a simplified picture of a complex world.
Moreover, in order to engage the Millennial audience, facts now increasingly take a backseat to cultivating an exciting narrative.
Newspapers once prided themselves on what they excluded, not on an pursuing an ideal of undiscriminating openness.
Since 1897, the New York Times’ slogan has been “All the news that’s fit to print.”
Today, the Times’ slogan might as well be “The following stories are based on actual events.”
In other words, the New York Times might be emulating Facebook as a platform that provides addictive fictional narratives imposed on real events.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/business/media/new-york-times-rukmini-callimachi-caliphate.html
The crisis now surrounding the podcast is as much about The Times as it is about Ms. Callimachi. She is, in many ways, the new model of a New York Times reporter. She combines the old school bravado of the parachuting, big foot reporter of the past, with a more modern savvy for surfing Twitter’s narrative waves and spotting the sorts of stories that will explode on the internet. She embraced audio as it became a key new business for the paper, and linked her identity and her own story of fleeing Romania as a child to her work. And she told the story of ISIS through the eyes of its members.
Ms. Callimachi’s approach to storytelling aligned with a more profound shift underway at The Times. The paper is in the midst of an evolution from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of great narratives, on the web and streaming services. And Ms. Callimachi’s success has been due, in part, to her ability to turn distant conflicts in Africa and the Middle East into irresistibly accessible stories. She was hired in 2014 from The Associated Press after she obtained internal Al Qaeda documents in Mali and shaped them into a darkly funny account of a penny-pinching terrorist bureaucracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Factors_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)
Could it be that reconstructing local journalism as a public utility would help to restrain the fictive and ideological tendencies that have emerged in national journalism?
More to the point, what would local journalism as a public utility look like?
It might look more like the BBC News.
The BBC News is a vast operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_News
BBC News is an operational business division[1] of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world’s largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online news coverage.[2][3] The service maintains 50 foreign news bureaus with more than 250 correspondents around the world.
The department’s annual budget is in excess of £350 million; it has 3,500 staff, 2,000 of whom are journalists.[2] BBC News’ domestic, global and online news divisions are housed within the largest live newsroom in Europe, in Broadcasting House in central London. Parliamentary coverage is produced and broadcast from studios in London. Through BBC English Regions, the BBC also has regional centres across England and national news centres in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. All nations and English regions produce their own local news programmes and other current affairs and sport programmes.
The BBC News is funded by the British government, yet the BBC nevertheless maintains a certain independence.
Perhaps because of this independence, everybody in the world complains about the biases of the BBC News.
The BBC is a quasi-autonomous corporation authorised by royal charter, making it operationally independent of the government, who have no power to appoint or dismiss its director general, and require it to report impartially. However, as with all major media outlets, it has been accused of political bias from across the political spectrum, both within the United Kingdom and abroad.
The BBC is funded by an annual fee that each household pays for television access.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom
Since April 2020, the annual cost is £157.50 for a colour licence and £53 for a black and white licence. Income from the licence is primarily used to fund the television, radio and online services of the BBC. The total income from licence fees was £3.83 billion in 2017–18.
Actually, the license fee is now regarded as a tax because it pays for more than just access to the BBC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom#Reclassification_as_a_tax
Reclassification as a tax
In January 2006, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) changed the classification of the licence fee from a service charge to a tax.[13] Explaining the change the ONS said: “in line with the definition of a tax, the licence fee is a compulsory payment which is not paid solely for access to BBC services. A licence is required to receive ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, satellite, or cable”. A briefing paper from the House of Commons Library described the licence fee as a hypothecated tax (i.e. one raised for a particular defined purpose).
Would Americans be willing to pay more fees or taxes in order to fund local journalism?
The status of the PBS and NPR in the USA might be suggestive.
In 2019, the revenue of the BBC was almost $5 billion for a country of 67 million people.
In contrast, the revenue of the PBS was $404 million for a country of 328 million people.
Moreover, the bulk of funding for the PBS and NPR seems to come ultimately from donations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS
PBS is funded by a combination of member station dues, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Datacast, pledge drives, and donations from both private foundations and individual citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding
In 2010, NPR revenues totaled $180 million, with the bulk of revenues coming from programming fees, grants from foundations or business entities, contributions and sponsorships.[24] According to the 2009 financial statement, about 50% of NPR revenues come from the fees it charges member stations for programming and distribution charges.[24] Typically, NPR member stations receive funds through on-air pledge drives, corporate underwriting, state and local governments, educational institutions, and the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). In 2009, member stations derived 6% of their revenue from federal, state and local government funding, 10% of their revenue from CPB grants, and 14% of their revenue from universities.[24][41] While NPR does not receive any direct federal funding, it does receive a small number of competitive grants from CPB and federal agencies like the Department of Education and the Department of Commerce. This funding amounts to approximately 2% of NPR’s overall revenues.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting channels federal funds to the PBS and NPR, but its total appropriation is less than $500 million per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadcasting
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is an American non-profit corporation created in 1967 by an act of the United States Congress and funded by the American people, as stated under their logo in use since 2000, to promote and help support public broadcasting.[3] The corporation’s mission is to ensure universal access to non-commercial, high-quality content and telecommunications services. It does so by distributing more than 70 percent of its funding to more than 1,400 locally owned public radio and television stations.
The CPB’s annual budget is composed almost entirely of an annual appropriation from Congress plus interest on those funds. 95% of the corporation’s appropriation goes directly to content development, community services, and other local station and system needs.[4]
For fiscal year 2014, its appropriation was US$445.5 million, including $500,000 in interest earned.
Judging from its prime time offerings, the PBS might best be understood as BBC programming delivery vehicle serving an American audience.
In fact, the donor class that funds the PBS would seem to consist of over-educated aging anglophiles.
The other main constituency of PBS is conscientious parents who are grateful that the PBS is capturing the attention of their very young children and perhaps making them smarter.
The PBS might have a calming effect on children that commercial TV does not.
Fred Rogers’ insight was that commercial TV captures the attention of children by deluging them with fast and loud programing in an effort to sell them stuff.
This over-stimulation of kids’ brains by commercial television has a negative and permanent effect on their development.
So a typical segment on “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” would show something like an egg timer quietly counting down for one minute.
Americans seem to appreciate public television insofar as it is “educational television” for children.
In fact, Americans might support tax money going to public television only because it does provide quality children’s programming.
Americans are willing to publicly fund children’s television because children are perceived as “innocent”.
That is, children are not regarded as being ethically culpable because they are relatively intellectually undeveloped.
But Americans turn a cold shoulder on public funding of TV for adults because adults can choose what to watch.
There is quality programing in the USA, but it is disturbing how quickly it degenerates into loud, frenetic mass entertainment.
One classic example is the sitcom “Happy Days”, which commenced in 1974 as a quiet and realistic meditation on coming of age in 1950s middle-class America.
On the margins of the show was the dark, almost silent character Arthur Fonzarelli, a tough working class ethnic who stood in disturbing contrast to white-bread America.
By the time the show closed in 1984, it had become loud and frenetic, aimlessly trying to recapture its earlier popularity.
By then, the “Fonz” had become the focus of the show as a fun, outgoing character, and the popular leader of the other young characters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
The original Star Trek, which aired from 1966 to 1969, is another example of how spectacle conflicted with the development of character and story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series#Reception
“Star Trek was again a very inconsistent show which at times sparkled with true ingenuity and pure science fiction approaches. At other times it was more carnival-like, and very much more the creature of television than the creature of a legitimate literary form.”
Likewise, Game of Thrones was originally very English in that the best scenes were of two people in a cold room having a witty, disturbing, intelligent conversation.
Over time, Game of Thrones was Americanized and it became all about … dragons.
The American showrunners never understood GoT and maybe even hated it, and so in the final season they revealed their true character and burned the show down.
(“Game of Thrones”, Old Nan)
Even PBS programming might tend to degenerate into spectacle.
After all, Downton Abby went from the contrast of social classes (Upstairs, Downstairs) to soap opera to opulence and ostentation (which might also describe Westworld’s devolution).
Again, it seems unlikely that Americans would be eager to commit substantial public funding in order to support local journalism.
First of all, the “individualism” of American public policy works against public funding.
Second, there is a preference in the USA for entertainment and spectacle over sober discussion and reflection, with the possible exception of certain TV programing for children.
There are two arguments in favor of publicly funding local journalism that are related to the experience of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
- The integrity of journalism is central to national security. So-called “platforms” like Facebook are really newspapers that literally work for hostile foreign governments that seek to disrupt the USA.
- Localism is crucial to national security. Just as some measure of (inefficient) national manufacturing is necessary in the face of a pandemic (e.g., PPE and medicine), national security as a whole is reliant on the inefficient preparation at the local level (e.g., warehousing PPE by states, not the feds).
In terms of disaster preparedness, the initial response is always local.
The national response only comes much later, after careful deliberation and after national capabilities have been marshaled and adjusted to the specific crisis.
Public support of local journalism would be a form of localism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Localism_(politics)
Localism describes a range of political philosophies which prioritize the local. Generally, localism supports local production and consumption of goods, local control of government, and promotion of local history, local culture and local identity. Localism can be contrasted with regionalism and centralized government, with its opposite being found in the unitary state.
Politically, local control is associated with the kind of local deliberative direct democratic processes that one finds (found?) in the New England town meeting.
As the size of a polity increases to the level of that of a superstate like the USA or the EU, by necessity, public political involvement becomes increasingly mediated by representation.
On a conceptual level, there are important affinities between localism and deliberative democracy. This concerns mainly the democratic goal of engaging citizens in decisions that affect them. Consequently, localism will encourage stronger democratic and political participatory forums and widening public sphere connectivity.
Like so much of the (romantic) discourse on localism, this is an idealistic vision that omits less admirable local tendencies, such as illegitimate discrimination against outsiders.
In contrast, the rationale for the public support of local journalism would be grounded in realist concerns such as local corruption, the corruption of social media and national security.
The coronavirus pandemic is a case in point.
There are at least five types of responses needed to deal with the pandemic:
- strict border control
- personal precautions (masks, distancing, etc.)
- testing, tracing, isolating
- banning superspreader activities
- messaging
Messaging is extremely important, especially early messaging.
Early messaging should emphasize the fundamentally uncertain nature of any supposed biological threat.
After all, complex phenomena are characterized by uncertainty.
Even centuries after societies have been devastated by plagues like the Black Death, so much still remains unknown and unresolved about those diseases.
On the other hand, sometimes epidemics fizzle out on their own.
Preparing for a pandemic is thus like playing Russian roulette with mother nature.
Most of the time, the gun does not actually go off — but it will, eventually.
The public can forget about that the fundamental unpredictability of pandemics and disasters in general — or perhaps never really understand uncertainty in the first place.
So the early messaging needs to explain to the public that they must take action to prepare for the worst but hope for the best.
Therefore, in the early stages of a pandemic, it’s okay to overreact, even if it does cause some damage to the social fabric and the economy.
Later in the crisis, healthcare policies should become more nuanced and precise as more specific information about the pandemic becomes known.
Interestingly, these two types of responses reflect the body’s response to disease.
The early response of society to a disaster should be like the body’s innate response to an infection.
Like the body’s early response, it is blunt and harsh and can take a toll.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/05/science/charting-a-covid-immune-response.html
The Innate Immune Response
In response to the invading virus, the body rapidly deploys molecules called cytokines that act like microscopic alarms, mobilizing reinforcements from elsewhere in the body. Their arrival generates inflammation; tissues swell with blood and cells, and become warm, red and sore.
If the innate immune system makes early progress against the virus, the infection may be mild. But if the body’s defenses flag, the coronavirus may continue replicating, ratcheting up the viral load. Faced with a growing threat, innate immune cells will continue to call for help, fueling a vicious cycle of recruitment and destruction. Prolonged, excessive inflammation can cause life-threatening damage to vital organs like the heart, kidneys and lungs.
The body’s later, more sophisticated response is tailored to the disease, with which the body has become much more familiar.
The Adaptive Immune Response
Eventually, a second wave of immune cells and molecules arrives, more targeted than their early counterparts and able to home in on the coronavirus and the cells it infects.
In the USA, there was neither an early nor a late response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The early federal “response” in the USA was to leave the 50 state’s to their own devices, and to complain when they did take action.
The later US federal “response” was to claim that it was adopting a non-vaccination “herd immunity” strategy.
Actually, the US federal government was only pretending to adopt the herd immunity strategy.
If the US federal government actually did have a non-vaccination herd immunity strategy, it would have taken action to shelter those who were most vulnerable to Covid.
IIRC, those who are most vulnerable to Covid make up 37% of the US population.
However, it is probably best that this vulnerable population is not being sequestered.
As Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York pointed out, it turns out that those who were isolated turned out to have the highest death rates.
Messaging is both important and complicated, because it involves advocating for policies that by necessity change as information changes.
It’s very important not to confuse the public or lose credibility as scientific knowledge of the pandemic evolves.
Perhaps the single worst messaging in terms of the current pandemic is the series of extreme policies broadcast by the UK government:
- Stay calm and carry on and let herd immunity do its thing.
- Lockdown and panic.
- Pack yourself into a pub and spend all your money.
- Lockdown and panic.
- Send your kids off to college and tell them to pack into the pubs.
The British are now a fundamentally confused and exhausted people who are not listening to anyone.
The WHO and the CDC did not do much better in terms of honest and consistent messaging.
The big question here is whether messaging at the local level would only confuse issues further.
In light of how easily the WHO and the CDC were corrupted, messaging at the local level would have to come from institutions not easily manipulated by governments.
The only local institution that would have some measure of autonomy would be local universities.
Interconnected universities would provide a horizontal network that would serve as a check and balance on a vertical, hierarchical and politicized structures.
Again, the early response to a societal disaster is typically a local response.
At the end of the day, every locality is on its own in the early stages of a disaster, and the locality must rely on local sources of information.
Indeed, there does need to be national and international coordinated responses to disasters like pandemics — in the later stages of the crisis.
The absence of coordination in the later stage of crisis is a mark of true failure of leadership.
But coordination in the chaotic early stages of crisis sounds more like aspiration than a reliable possibility.
Universities would collect and process information, and local journalists would disseminate and explain it.
Also, states and localities need to warehouse their own personal protection equipment and emergency supplies.
Three related issues in local disaster preparedness are equity, autonomy and accountability.
Some localities are not as fortunate as others in terms of their financial resources.
The federal and state governments should ideally provide equal funding per capita to municipal governments in order to prepare for disasters.
This would not just apply to disaster preparedness, but more generally, such as with the funding of public schools.
Once localities have been granted equal resources from higher level governments, they should be allowed to make mistakes and deal with the consequences.
One big question is what kind of resources Western countries will have in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic.
Western societies chose a path of flipping back and forth between the extremes of totally opening up the economy and then going hard back into crushing lockdowns.
Like a wrecking ball swinging back and forth, this sacrificed lives and economic growth.
Meanwhile, Asian and Pacific societies avoided harsh lockdowns by:
- maintaining strong border controls,
- adopting personal precautions,
- testing, tracing, and isolating,
- banning superspreaders like nightclubs, and
- explaining policy clearly and consistently .
In the future, it might be Asian and Pacific societies that will have the financial resources to invest in local disaster preparations and in local journalism as a public utility.
The West is toast.
