I think the most obvious examples of this are the Apple and Android app stores.
We know exactly how much money the end user is paying for these, and so unlike the tik-tok video with 800k views we can easily understand their value. We also know Apple/Google are taking is 30% of that value.
It's not just individual creators on social media that are suffering from this but also large companies.
The strategy is not to build a product but a marketplace, where others will build products and you will take a cut.
App stores are the largest marketplaces. Instead of taking a cut from levels produced for a game, articles published on a website, videos published on YouTube, or plugins developed for some enterprise software, they take a cut from all applications developed for a platform. But the principle is the same.
The problem here is not taking the cut, per se, but rather the oligopoly. If we had dozens of app stores, with easy switching for users, the developers would move to less abusive ones. Maintaining the infrastructure costs some money, so taking maybe 5% would be appropriate. Or maybe taking 10% and providing excellent development tools in return.
With websites that monetize articles, I don't mind that they take a cut, because I can easily move away from them if I decide that they take too much and it would be cheaper to host everything myself, and maybe pay someone to move the articles from the old place to the new one. Moving articles is simple, it's just text and pictures, and maybe some formatting gets lost in the process.
With Apple and Android, there are no other places to move, and the applications would need a rewrite. Which is why they have greater leverage.
The problem is not taking a cut (what the author refers to as parasitism). Infrastructure costs something; how else do you imagine it would be paid for? The problem is the lack of choice.
There's a network to consider. Yes, a creator might wish to choose a platform that is less abusive (for example, that takes a smaller cut).
Well, Bandcamp exists, but it doesn't have the reach that Spotify has.
Creators need to be willing to jointly create the marketplace platform themselves, or they need to be ready to constantly struggle against the interests of the platform's owner.
It's almost like they copied the business model (and platform fees) from other walled garden game stores and systems.
Why should any game developer (Epic for example) have to pay the same amount to Apple or Google that they are currently paying to Nintendo or Sony for the same game?
Do we need some new laws to force Google to allow other game stores for Android other than Google Play? Maybe one from Amazon or something. Or some stores in China.
> And then the web billionaires won’t even need to toss those few shekels at artists.
Why say "shekel" here instead of "dollar"? Or any other currency?
Given the context of the article, the choice of words is either extremely poor taste or an antisemitic dogwhistle
He does have another article [0] where he just hand-waves away LF Celine's antisemitism [1], so if I had to guess it's the latter
[0] https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-most-cynical-novel-ever-...
[1] "The German officer and writer Ernst Jünger stated in his Paris war diaries that Céline told him on 7 December 1941 "of his consternation, his astonishment" that the Germans did not "exterminate" the French Jews." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Ferdinand_C%C3%A9line#An...
It's probably because the use of "shekel" is slang in the US, and it carries a connotation of "very low amount of currency."
It's idiomatic rather than a dog whistle in this use. I think you could argue that it's an appropriation and its modern/continued use is divisive.
By what means would the word be recognizable to a broad audience in cultures that do not use the currency (it's not widely used)? "Only anti-Semites will recognize it in such cultures" seems extremely unlikely. In order to be hidden (a dog whistle), it also needs to be more broadly understood as innocuous.
Idiomatic maybe in alt right circles. I've never seen anyone else use it as a figure of speech like this
Idiomatic in just the broad culture. Whatever alt right people do with it, and its special context in their bigotry, is another thing.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/shekel
> shekels, Slang. money; cash.
To be clear, the argument you're making is that it's blatantly antisemitic rather than a dogwhistle?
No, there are two arguments.
First is that I don't find this use to be sufficient evidence to go around claiming that the author is an anti-Semite. It seems more likely to be idiomatic than to be a dog whistle.
Second is that I feel the word has divisive cultural baggage in our current culture.
Not just parasite also just straight fraud. All these services promise a fair transaction but as soon as something goes wrong claim no responsibility. Uber ABB Google none of them accept any responsibility when something goes wrong.
Hmm, not sure if I like all of the examples here. There is genuine value in being a distributor - a single artist doesn’t have the means to push music to all their followers, nor in many cases a following to begin with.
The value of content distribution platforms is thus in logistics: getting the right content to the right people. And on the other hand, people aren’t willing to pay a lot for this.
I think the bigger example of parasite culture comes in the form of individuals. People whose jobs largely work to support the office politicians and their campaigns (HR departments, mid-level managers, etc.)
Then there are actual politicians, each of whom need large staffs to do the work they’ve been hired to do because the processes have been made complex enough to justify the jobs of their staffers. Or the people who think it’s okay to spend a billion dollars on a software platform for public education. Or the people who charge a billion dollars for a public education platform.
The examples are everywhere these days when you look around. It’s hard to find organizations that actively weed out this behaviour. Does anyone have an example of an organization that has bucked this trend?
AI firms seem to be doing a bit of "regulatory entrepreneurship", claiming fair use and/or that copyright claims do not apply, and trying to move quickly before any regulation takes hold (while encouraging any regulation that would create new market barriers and enrich incumbents.)
I agreed with the title. But the article is talking about something else than I expected.
These services aren't parasites. Theory of the firm, spontaneous organization, systems tend to the lowest energy state, all that, things settled into the current arrangement because it is superior than the previous arrangement. These companies built things that connect people who create more often than they consume with people who consume more often than they create, and they middleman it, make it easier for everyone around to get what they want and take their worth.
They're beginning to deliberately become monopolies, control access to distribution, this is parasitic in some sense, but it is sub optimal and eventually ripe for disruption.
What I thought he was talking about was how people these days seem to always be looking for a way to get one over on someone else. It seems there's a culture of "the only way to get ahead is at someone else's expense" and most business models are about where to find that someone and how to swindle him. I went to a consultation with a surgeon to see if an old surgery was still in good shape, his only motivation was to try to find a way to get me to agree to another surgery regardless if I needed it. I talked to my friend who is in the medical industry and he said "of course he's trying to sell surgery, hes a surgeon." It's a given that people will try to swindle you, even if that means butchering your body. That's what I think when I hear the term "parasite culture."
This sounds like the old Marxist argument of Capitalists appropriating (or parasitically leaching) the surplus value of the laborers they employ.
But in the case of social media, people get paid not only in money but also with attention and status ('likes'). Actually, the vast majority of users aren't getting paid any money. But we're social creatures, and we'll do almost anything for status and attention.
The parasite who wrote this article wants payments when people train AIs. SMH.
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