Monthly Archives: December 2010

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Rumours of publishing’s death etc etc etc

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Apologies for lack of content here today; without going in to too much detail, I’ve spent much of the last 18 hours talking to unspecified Lovecraftian deities on the big white porcelain telephone, and as such blogging is somewhat off the agenda (along with most things that involve thinking clearly or moving around much).

But I thought I should at least pop in and mention Cory Doctorow’s latest Publisher’s Weekly piece, wherein he ruminates on what he’s learned from elaborately self-publishing his latest short fiction collection, With A Little Help.

With a Little Help has helped me realize something: whatever I do next, I don’t want to be in charge of all these moving parts. I can’t be both a Zen, let-it-all-happen-at-its-own-pace writer and an aggressive, deadline-pushing publisher. If I were realistically going to keep up this publishing stuff, I would need to outsource every task that requires the virtues inherent in agents, editors, sales, marketing, distribution and retail, especially that willingness to tithe a large portion of my working day to logistics, follow-ups, and calls.

Talks the talk, walks the walk, learns in public, shares the lessons. Could this be the same Doctorow who gets accused of advocating all artists give their work away for nothing, and of dismantling old business models with no thought to what will succeed them? I guess someone’s only hearing what they want to hear… and I look forward to the inevitable attempts to explain that it’s me. 🙂

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Further corrosive effects of networked handheld computing

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Thanks to recent events, it’s almost banal to talk about how the increasing ubiquity of  mobile devices and internet connectivity empowers the average Josephine on the street, but it’s worth remembering that governments aren’t the only hierarchies feeling the burn: the giants of retail commerce are starting to see the playing field flattened by price comparison apps [via MetaFilter].

Until recently, retailers could reasonably assume that if they just lured shoppers to stores with enticing specials, the customers could be coaxed into buying more profitable stuff, too.

Now, marketers must contend with shoppers who can use their smartphones inside stores to check whether the specials are really so special, and if the rest of the merchandise is reasonably priced.

“The retailer’s advantage has been eroded,” says Greg Girard of consultancy IDC Retail Insights, which recently found that roughly 45% of customers with smartphones had used them to perform due diligence on a store’s prices. “The four walls of the store have become porous.”

Some of the most vulnerable merchants: sellers of branded, big-ticket items like electronics and appliances, which often prompt buyers to comparison shop. Best Buy, the nation’s largest electronics chain, said Tuesday that it may lose market share this year, a downward trend that some analysts are attributing in part to pressure from price comparison apps.

The WSJ points out that not everyone has a smartphone capable of doing this sort of on-the-spot comparison, and that it tends to be applied to “big ticket” tech items rather than everyday bits and bobs like groceries. But if we assume that market penetration of handheld tech and mobile internet continues at its current pace, it’s not a wild leap to assume that price comparison will become a standard function, and possibly even the “killer app” that makes mobile internet appealing to those currently uninterested in its more abstract bleeding-edge “social” uses. If the Western recession continues for a few years, tools that save money will become extremely popular, and as a result we may see market forces narrowing traditionally huge profit margins very quickly indeed.

But hey, it’s not all about man-versus-The-Man: ubicomp also lets you single out your fellow citizens for their transgressions against the public good.

DriveMeCrazy, developed by Shazam co-founder Philip Inghelbrecht, is a voice-activated app that encourages drivers to report bad behavior by reciting the offender’s license plate into a smartphone. The poor sap gets “flagged” and receives a virtual “ticket,” which may not sound like much until you realize all the information — along with date, time and location of the “offense” — is sent to the DMV and insurance companies.

Anyone can write a ticket, even pedestrians and cyclists. No one is safe from being tattled on. Even if you don’t use the program, which went live Wednesday, you can’t opt out of being flagged if someone thinks you’re driving like a schmuck. Inghelbrecht is emphatic in saying he sees no privacy issues with the app and insists the end of road-going anonymity can only improve safety.

Now there’s a delightful conundrum for modern morality: we’d all love to be able to shop that douchebag who cut us up while clocking ninety in the fast lane, but we’d hate to be stung for the two minutes we left the car in a no parking zone so we could pop into the post office on our lunch break. The ability to mutually police each other’s behaviour represents a potentially massive shift in the way we think about society… but it also opens the gates to new forms of non-hierarchical persecution, pettiness and holier-than-thou bullshit.

For example, how about an app for reporting non-Christian (or non-Muslim, non-atheist, non-Liberal or non-Conservative) behaviour to a localised public forum? That’s sure to end well! Or an app for reporting people who throw pets into bins for a giggle, perhaps…

It’s a clichĂ© to point out how much power the networked society offers us as individuals. But it’s less of a clichĂ©, I think, to point out that we’re going to have to learn fast about the responsibility of individual and community power – not to mention a new need for mutual tolerance in a transparent world – if we want to avoid descending into a world even more dog-eat-dog than the one technology offers us an escape from. “Look first to the beam in one’s own eye”, and all that.

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Crashvertising, or “why I don’t watch exploitative shit like the X Factor”

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It’s a tip o’ the hat to Chairman Bruce for bringing this to light: Crashvertising. I’m pretty sure it’s a subversive art prank rather than a real service, (although, as the months pass by in the weird weird world of the intertubes, I get less and less confident in saying that about… well, about anything). But the basic premise is this: you know how everyone rubbernecks at road accidents, right? Well, the folks behind Crashvertise will hang around by road accidents with banners and placards advertising your product or service, getting full commercial value out of that captive audience. Genius, right?

Part of me is reluctant to spell out the subtext, because I’m sure you can all see it anyway. But nonetheless I’m going to take this opportunity to climb onto one of my little soapboxes, because my circle of friends both online and off contain a depressingly large subset of people: people more than smart enough to see (and deplore) the subtext of Crashvertise, but seemingly unable to make the logical leap to identifying the grotesque exploitation of shows like The X Factor, America’s Got Talent and their ilk. This frustrates me greatly. They are the same thing.

The most common response I get from people when I call them out on watching those shows is along the lines of “oh, I know it’s dreadful, but it’s car-crash TV, isn’t it? You can’t help yourself but watch!” My counter-response has always been something remarkably similar to Crashvertise: sure, we all instinctively rubber-neck at car-crashes, but are you still morally comfortable with looking at car-crashes which have been staged with the express purpose of attracting your attention toward the billboards just behind them?

Oh, I can hear what you’re thinking. Believe me, I’ve had every possible counter-response to my counter-response that there is: “it’s just entertainment”, “no one’s forced into doing it”, “no one gets hurt”. Well, to tackle those three in order:

  • if The X Factor is just entertainment, then we should start encouraging and monetising bullying at schools and in workplaces rather than trying to prevent it (heck, it might help make up the funding shortfalls in the education systems, right?);
  • sure, no one is physically forced into doing it, but the cultural forces that encourage people to debase themselves so thoroughly for the chance to “become famous” (read as “be exploited even more publicly, thoroughly and systematically for the profit of others”) are insidious and incredibly powerful nonetheless, not to mention indicative of something deeply cruel, selfish and objectifying in the way we see the world;
  • and as for no one getting hurt, well, if the tabloid headlines chronicling the wrecks and burnouts on the hard shoulder of the fame highway aren’t stories of people being deeply hurt by a machine that makes money from selling their pain, I don’t know what they are.

“Oh, Paul, don’t take it so seriously; it’s just a bit of fun for Saturday night! I’m not harming anyone!” Well, I’m sorry, but yes, you are.

And the “I’m watching it ironically!” defence is bullshit, too; in fact, that annoys me even more than the people who believe it’s a genuine competition rather than a rigged open-air market research focus group. You know it’s fake, you know it’s scripted; you know, then, that everything you see is done with the intent of maximising viewer appeal, and that while the public votes themselves may not be rigged, the way the candidates are portrayed to the voting public most certainly is. You know that the poor schmucks who audition for the shows are either too ignorant to understand what they’re letting themselves in for, or foolish enough to gamble against the house and think they can win in the long run. And you still encourage that debasement and exploitation, simply by tuning in every week.

By watching these shows, “ironically” or otherwise, you are complicit in a form of public cruelty to other human beings. You see the ads that support the shows, see the brands that co-promote with them, watch performances by the ailing glove-puppet entertainers that are the only things left the big record labels know how to sell; your eyeballs not only validate that cruelty, but monetise it as well.

You are voluntarily staring at car crashes that were deliberately staged in front of billboards, and you are calling it entertainment.

Ballard would be proud of his prescience.

Rant over.

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No recession in the metaverse, either

A sweeping statement, perhaps, but still: having already established that the “global recession” isn’t actually global, there are signs that some things are still selling hard and fast here in the West. The weird bit? One of those things is access to a hyperreal virtual universe. I’m talking, of course, about World Of Warcraft; I’ll let Edward Castronova sum it up in a few sentences.

Blizzard’s Cataclysm broke a single-day sales record for PC games: 3.3m copies in a day. At $40 each, that’s $132m revenue in a day.

The weekend box office for the latest Narnia move this past weekend was $24m. The other fantasy releases like Tangled and Harry Potter, came to $24m in their second or third week.

OK, granted, WoW was an international release, and those box office figures are (I presume) US-only. But even so, the entertainments that we value sufficiently to pay money for are changing, and changing fast… and no matter how much “can’t live without it” rhetoric you might hear from its regular users, I’m pretty sure no economist in their right mind would describe WoW as anything other than a leisure luxury.

And hey – looks like Blizzard’s managing to make a pretty dime in a piracy-riddled digital world, too. How’d you like them apples, Hollywood?