The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. Astra Taylor
companies become the enemy only when they try to dictate how their products are consumed instead of letting people engage with them freely, recontextualizing and remixing popular artifacts, modifying and amending and feeding them back into the semiotic stream.
When all is said and done, the notion of a hybrid economy turns out to be nothing more than an upbeat version of digital sharecropping, a scenario in which all of us have the right to remix sounds and images and spread them through networks that profit from our every move. The vision of cultural democracy upheld by new-media thinkers has us all marinating in commercial culture, downloading it without fear of reprisal, repurposing fragments and uploading the results to pseudo-public spaces—the privately owned platforms that use our contributions for their own ends or sell our attention and information to advertisers. Under this kind of open system, everything we do gets swept back into a massive, interactive mash-up in the cloud, each bit parsed in the data mine, invisible value extracted by those who own the backend.
In a way, this is the epitome of what communications scholar Henry Jenkins calls “convergence culture”—the melding of old and new media that the telecom giants have long been looking forward to, for it portends a future where all activity flows through their pipes. But it also represents a broader blurring of boundaries: communal spirit and capitalist spunk, play and work, production and consumption, making and marketing, editorializing and advertising, participation and publicity, the commons and commerce. The “old rhetoric of opposition and co-optation” has been rendered obsolete, Jenkins assures us.24 But if there is no opposition—no distinction between noncommercial and commercial, public and private, independent and mainstream—it is because co-optation has been absolute.
Though she now tours under her own name, the Portland-based musician Rebecca Gates long fronted the Spinanes, a band that, in the nineties and early aughts, released three albums on the influential Sub Pop label. She had, in many ways, the classic indie rock experience, playing clubs around the country, sleeping on couches, getting aired on college radio and MTV’s 120 Minutes. Sub Pop provided advances for the band to make records and tour support, and though the albums never sold enough copies to recoup, the label made it possible for Gates to devote herself to her craft. Then, after a hiatus of ten years, Gates finished a new record and went back on the road, but this time she self-released her music, taking advantage of the low cost of digital distribution. Gates was cautiously optimistic that she could end up better off than under the old model—that the enterprise may be more sustainable and satisfying—even if she sold fewer copies in the end.
Gates thought a lot about the new opportunities offered by technology as part of a project undertaken in partnership with the Future of Music Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of independent artists, lobbying for everything from health care to community radio. She led an ambitious survey of working musicians to see how they had actually fared as the recording industry transforms. “It’s really easy to get hung up on success stories,” Gates told me, referencing appealing anecdotes about creators who “made it” by leaving their record labels and going viral online or by giving their music away and relying on touring income or T-shirt sales. Gates discovered it was hard to generalize about people’s experiences. “I’ve seen hard data for people who are in successful bands, quote unquote, festival headlining bands, who would make more money in a good retail job,” she said.
“There’s this myth that’s not quite a myth that you don’t need intermediaries anymore,” Gates continued. But it is harder than it seems for artists like Gates to bypass the giants and go solo, directing traffic to their own Web sites, though that’s what many artists would prefer to do. “Let’s imagine your record is done, that somehow you paid for production and you’re in the clear—then immediately you’re in a situation where you are dealing with iTunes, which takes thirty percent, and if you are small and you go through a brokerage, which you sometimes have to do, you can lose fifty percent.” Artists who do work with labels, big or small, often end up getting less from each digital sale.
A similar arrangement applies to streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify, which have come under fire from a range of working musicians for their paltry payouts. The four biggest major labels have an equity stake in Spotify and receive a higher royalty rate than the one paid to independent artists and labels (one independent songwriter calculated that it would take him 47,680 plays on Spotify to earn the profit of the sale of one LP25). “As far as I can tell, there’s been this replication of the old model,” Gates said. “There’s a large segment of the tech platforms that are simply a replacement for any sort of old label structures except that now they don’t give advances.”
During this crucial moment of cultural and economic restructuring, artists themselves have been curiously absent from a conversation dominated by executives, academics, and entrepreneurs. Conference after conference is held to discuss the intersection of music and new media, Gates notes, but working musicians are rarely onstage talking about their experiences or presenting their ideas, even as their work is used to lure audiences and establish lucrative ventures, not unlike the way books and CDs have long been sold as loss leaders at big chains to attract shoppers. The cultural field has become increasingly controlled by companies “whose sole contribution to the creative work,” to borrow Cory Doctorow’s biting expression, “is chaining children to factories in China and manufacturing skinny electronics” or developing the most sophisticated methods for selling our data to advertisers.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. One natural consequence of Web-based technologies was supposed to be the elimination of middlemen, or “disintermediation.” “The great virtue of the Internet is that it erodes power,” the influential technologist Esther Dyson said. “It sucks power out of the center, and takes it to the periphery, it erodes the power of institutions over people while giving to individuals the power to run their lives.”26 The problem, though, is that disintermediation has not lived up to its potential. Instead, it has facilitated the rise of a new generation of mediators that are sometimes difficult to see. As much as networked technology has dismantled and distributed power in more egalitarian ways, it has also extended and obscured power, making it less visible and, arguably, harder to resist.
The disruptive impact of the Web has been uneven at best. From one angle, power has been sucked to the periphery: new technologies have created space for geographically dispersed communities to coalesce, catalyzed new forms of activism and political engagement, and opened up previously unimaginable avenues for self-expression and exposure to art and ideas. That’s the story told again and again. But if we look from another angle and ask how, precisely, the power of institutions has been eroded, the picture becomes murkier.
Entrenched institutions have been strengthened in many ways. Thanks to digital technologies, Wall Street firms can trade derivatives at ever-faster rates, companies can inspect the private lives of prospective and current employees, insurance agencies have devised new methods to assess risky clients, political candidates can marshal big data to sway voters, and governments can survey the activities of citizens as never before. Corporate control—in media as in other spheres—is as secure as ever. In profound ways, power has been sucked in, not out.
In the realm of media and culture, the uncomfortable truth is that the information age has been accompanied by increasing consolidation and centralization, a process aided by the embrace of openness as a guiding ideal. While the old-media colossi may not appear to loom as large over our digital lives as they once did, they have hardly disappeared. Over the previous decade, legacy media companies have not fallen from the Fortune 500 firmament but have actually risen. In early 2013 they surprised analysts by reporting skyrocketing share prices: Disney and Time Warner were up 32 percent, CBS 40.2 percent, Comcast a shocking 57.6 percent.27
These traditional gatekeepers have been joined by new online gateways, means of accessing information that cannot be avoided. A handful of Internet and technology companies have become as enormous and influential as the old leviathans: they now make up thirteen of the thirty largest publicly traded corporations in the United States.28 The omnipresent Google, which, on an average day, accounts for approximately 25 percent of all North American consumer Internet traffic, has gobbled up over one hundred smaller firms, partly as a method of thwarting potential rivals, averaging