Paying For It (the dislike club part II)
Our mini-series about the internet continues. This week we take a close look at the fundamental business model of the web – advertising. In 1993 your host was a founding member of an international monkey wrench gang that fought billboards in outer space. He recently ran into one of his old comrades in Midtown-South (Manhattan’s tech district) and discovered that his side actually lost the war. Ethan Zuckerman, the man who invented the pop up ad, admits that we must rethink the fundamentals of the web, and activist, writer, and filmmaker Astra Taylor questions whether the internet actually benefits independent creators.
7 comments on Paying For It (the dislike club part II)
I couldn’t figure out how much of this series is fiction. I still can’t. The space billboards seem too much like satire (though according to Wikipedia that actually was a thing), but the anthropologist and Anonymous are real for sure. I started listening to this podcast a few months ago, with “Man Without a Country” which was, I assume fictional. Is the ‘dislike club’ a real series, is this a serious thing you intend to do?
I’ll be following with interest. I’m not on the tweets or teh facebooks, so when you start something, announce it the old fashioned way with your podcast or website, please?
In Latin, ad vertere indicates “to turn toward”.
I hope the irony of an interview discussing advertising seeming to be the only way the internet happens being bookended by ads wasn’t lost on you, Benjamen.
This episode strongly reminded me of a clip from an Adam Curity documentary All Watched Over By Machines Of Living Grave and the quotation of Humdog’s Pandora’s Vox.
Excerpts:
“it is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality. some people write about cyberspace as though it were a 60′s utopia. in reality, this is not true.” “i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment.” “[Cyberspace] is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as spectacle.”