Lately even I have noticed a stir concerning the antics of NPR's head honcho. Questions of rights, and authority, and content moderation, arising from the horse's mouth, CEO Katherine Maher.
One reason this kind of brouhaha seems to pack the "news cycle" without ever coming to any resolution, is context. The context is something like, "Now look what they've done," or "What next!?" or "Free Speech Under Assault!" Strongly-held opinions fly, on whether or not our rights are being canceled, whether or not Maher is a liberal sheep or a crypto-fascist in liberal sheep's clothing. Important as such questions may seem, it's much worse than that. There are profound implications.
We're in a new context. After a shift in paradigms we still haven't quite understood, information is all but worthless, as information. Its function is no longer to inform, but to arouse reaction. Because that's where the money is, in the Attention Age. This has skewed the balance of power, and put on hold any effective efforts to deal with rising global temperature, which will certainly drive humans extinct in decades, not centuries. That's not the only slate-wiper we face, but it's enough.
Some say the world will end in fire -1
The CEO of NPR operates in a new feudal hierarchy, a vassal pretender to the throne of the attentional empire in which NPR is a significant fiefdom. This makes the appointment seem more rational, at least. Or maybe it validates a theory about paradigm change. Yanis Varoufakis has labeled this new paradigm "Technofeudalism" -2 in his excellent eponymous book. I started with Howard Richards -3, and Shoshana Zuboff -4 as background, which helped to make sense out of the incomprehensible mess in which most of us are mired and floundering.
For now, try this on:
Everything is a commodity now, including speech, but also the right to speak, and also access to a platform. And wait there's more, whatever audience may show up (or be corralled algorithmically). Last and least, whatever is said, to that audience, on that platform, under constraints such as liability that may be imposed in a privately-owned space.
Commodities now have two kinds of value. The old familiar Exchange Value, like a bushel of potatoes, or pork-belly futures, or stock certificates, or crypto-coin if you dare; and another kind, what Varoufakis calls Experiential Value. For present purposes I'll call it Content Value, because it forms the content of all "social" media and other content-dependent screen environments, without which none of those enterprises can exist. Yet, they don't pay for it.
Content Value includes intangibles like emotional states, emotional triggers, sense of belonging (or not), nostalgia, vicarious experience; and all the conversations, documents, videos, chats, texts, tweets, etc., appertaining thereto.
The main difference between these two forms of value is in whether they take up warehouse space, or exist only while being "consumed" in the mind of the beholder, occupying their attention. One takes a large amount of square footage, and people have to move it around; but there's an awful lot more of the other kind, and it moves people around.
Content Value runs the gamut from the joy of new love, the delight of a baby's first steps, our songs, stories, games, gatherings, all the way down the spectrum of human experience to streaming videos of genocidal mass murder. In this context it's all grist for the same mill.
Regardless of whatever goes into its production, this form of value is extracted free of charge by every means possible, mainly software algorithms designed to shock and addict "users" exactly like a drug dealer, and biopsy their virtual flesh every few seconds.
As noted these commodities account for the entire content of every media platform, and most search engine traffic. The entire system is fueled by content value obtained from the public without remuneration or even knowledge, as audiences are quietly assembled, strip-searched, and bundled all unbeknownst into tranches for sale. The "Big Data" goes to political analysis and propaganda firms, state security apparatus, to train Large Language Model AIs... oh, and not forgetting consumer advertising.
Relationships between cloud fiefdoms and land-based governments ("legacy governments"?) are undergoing deep changes as well. Markets are not controlled by governments, although they struggle, which has varying impacts on our lives. Today, when investors must be satisfied before anything can be done, governments (even those issuing the currency) are at the mercy of investors along with everybody else.
An enterprise such as Google or FaceBook, which were just corporations in the Information Age, rode the Attention Age paradigm upheaval to potential rivalry with governments. The balance of power, which had rested upon information as well as the potential for military violence, now hinges on new attention markets. The media platforms, or their backers, with their efficiency at mobilizing public reaction, hold all the cards. Government pandering to investor confidence accounts for the bizarre direction of legal and policy decisions. This had rendered democracy dysfunctional.
It has been reported that the dominant search engine
"listed the Israeli Ministry of Defense as a customer and included video tutorials for creating custom artificial intelligence models on top of proprietary datasets"
Simultaneous to international coverage of Google's firing of 28 workers... the founder of Google's Israeli research and development center... had been promoted to head the entirety of Google Research. The announcement was publicly confirmed... by Mr. Matias's son Michael, a former officer in the elite Israeli signals intelligence component known as Unit 8200... who... "founded two AI teams to integrate machine learning and deep learning into cyber systems" within Unit 8200. -5
The keyword in "marketplace of ideas" isn't "ideas"
To sum up, speech ain't free. Freedom ain't free. If you are allowed free access, it's in exchange for free access to your intimate personal data (an Exchange Value), and for any Content Value you may produce while connected. It is an obscenely twisted bargain, in which all of the values involved are treated as the de facto property of the platform owners in the first place.
Just for hooking you up to your "Friends." Such a deal.
Freedom of Speech allows you to say anything you want in the Public Square. That's if you can find one. Even the virtual Public Square is somebody's Real Estate now. If you are allowed free access (if you pay no fee to speak), you are producing their Content Value. That's cloud-capital, the extractive product of unpaid labor. Your unpaid labor. As Varoufakis points out, we are all cloud-serfs now. Content Value is extracted without remuneration (now the "free" in "free speech"). If you happen to be paid, that is a Cost subtracted from your access privileges, or perhaps you are a Cloud Artisan (one notch above serfdom).
NPR and Maher don't care about your right to speak freely; it's all about audience rights. An audience is not a right: it's a property, like NPR's audience, where NPR gets to say what their audience has the right to hear. What NPR's audience hears is optimized to gather and retain maximum attention. Journalism is going off life-support, and not in a good way.
It's not about autonomy, it's about market violence: just as Universal Basic Income (UBI) is seen as labor market interference (competing for workers with employers), the public square is seen as allowing black market trade in ideas.
1 Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-- Robert Frost
2 Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism (2023) Bodley Head
3 Economic Theory and Community Development
Why putting community first is essential to our survival, Howard Richards, with the assistance of Gavin Andersson
Understanding the Global Economy Peace Education Books, (2004) or pretty much anything he wrote
4 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019) New York, Public Affairs-Hachette Book Group
5 Google promotes Israeli Air Force vet to global research position
