It’s Not Just Computer Magazines Ending
Bruce Sterling has a line, which I now can’t find the source for, that goes something like “the frontier of the 21st century is the wreckage of the unsustainable.”
I’ve been meaning to link to Harry McCracken’s The End of Computer Magazines in America, like the rest of the tech blogosphere (see also Gruber, Snell, Tsai). Like everyone else, maybe note that this is part of the larger trend of advertising-supported magazines going extinct—magazines, remember them?—and then maybe do a wistful Gen-X anecdote about how The Kids These Days™️ just aren’t into computers for their own sake anymore.
(And McCracken’s piece is worth reading if for no reason than for his description of what a “real magazine” was like at their peak—there are things that look and act like magazines, but none of them have those kinds of resources.)
But then Buzzfeed laid off the news arm, Vice looks like it’s about to implode and the WGA went on strike. And suddenly it’s less about “oh man, I miss Dr. Dobbs journal too” and instead the entire post-dot-com media landscape is running aground at once.
And these events, like Toy ‘R Us going under, or newspapers withering away, tend to produce a lot of sad looks and thinkpieces about how that’s too bad, but times have moved on, and Adan’s Smith’s Invisible Hand has just smothered Bed Bath and Beyond with a decorative pillow, and there’s no stopping progress!
But there’s a key point that I think often gets hand-waved away that John Rogers perfectly highlights in this tweet chain, which I’ll quote here:
2) There’s an unfortunate tendency in modern American thought to write about economies, or markets, like they’re the weather. Like they’re natural phenomena, you know, “ market forces”, the invisible hand, etc, shit just happens, can’t be helped!
3) Bullshit. Economies, markets, are products of human thought. They are shaped by the rules we place upon them and distorted by the will of those who operate within them.
And that’s the point. This didn’t all happen because of the weather; we don’t have magazines anymore and TV writers are broke because of choices people made.
People chose to use the disruption of the web, and craigslist, and google adwords to pivot away from sustainability and towards a growth-at-al-costs model, hoping the slurry of cheap, low-quality content would somehow convert a sea of distracted eyeballs into a viable business model.
People chose to gut whole industries to make rich people richer.
People chose to try to turn TV writers into gig workers.
For decades now, the financialization vultures have been hollowing out our whole civilization, chasing “growth” and sucking the wealth into fewer and fewer hands. This didn’t happen by accident, or just because “progress”, people chose to do this, and the rest of us chose to let it happen.
The web and everything that came with it is usually described in terms of Disruption—throwing existing, stogy, companies into disarray, and letting new, nimble replacements an opportunity to slide in and serve those customers better. And that’s true! But also true, and something we’ve not done a good job recognizing, is that any wide scale disruption allows the scam artists and the vampires in to get their clutches into a new set of enterprises.
Looking over the wreckage of the 21st century, we all have to start doing a better job telling the difference between “disruptors” and “parasites”.
Theres another line I can’t source that goes something like “the internet turns everyone into musicians.” But—it didn’t have to!
There’s the usual chorus of “Get a real job!” anytime someone asks for a bigger slice of the existing pie. More often than not, this seems to come from the deep antipathy in American culture towards any job that’s in any way creative; any job that someone might actually enjoy. But always left unsaid is what jobs count as real?
But here’s the thing—we get to choose which jobs are real. What if we chose the jobs we wanted to do?
The unsustainable is wrecking out. We can chose what comes next.