Free Speech, vs. Free Profiting-by-Lying by Spotify
Free Speech, vs. Free Profiting-by-Lying by Spotify
& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-02-08 Tu
CONDITION: Coyotes in the Neighborhood…
Six houses away:
First: Free Speech, vs. Free Profiting-by-Lying by Spotify
The very sharp Ben Thompson seems to me to have this one completely wrong.
Free expression is a very powerful value indeed in America.
Free profiting-by-lying—juicing your profit numbers by spreading misinformation to scare the shit out of your readers, and leading them to ruin their lives, all because by so doing you can glue their eyeballs to a screen and sell them ads—is not fine, but ugly and contemptible. It, rightly, is a very powerful value only to those who glee in hacking for profit the brains of their users to their detriment.
Spotify having Joe Rogan in its podcast directory is free speech. Apple having Joe Rogan in its podcast directory is free speech. Overcast having Joe Rogan in its podcast directory is free speech. If Apple were to delete Joe Rogan from its podcast directory, if Overcast were to delete Joe Rogan from its podcast directory, I would be upset.
What’s that? You say you Joe Rogan has been deleted from the Apple Podcasts directory? You say Joe Rogan has been deleted from the Overcast podcast directory?
What dastardly creature has committed such a violation of free-speech norms?
What’s that? You say Spotify has deprived Joe Rogan of his ability to reach those who want to hear him who use Apple Podcasts or Overcast, or another non-Spotify mode of access? Spotify has cancelled him from the Apple and Overcast directories?
You say Spotify has paid Joe Rogan in the nine figures, has blocked his podcasts from Apple and Overcast and other non-Spotify listeners, and made his podcasts Spotify exclusives? You say that Spotify then wants to spend money like water, saying: YOU MUST LISTEN ON SPOTIFY! ONLY ON SPOTIFY CAN YOU GET JOE ROGAN!! AND YOU REALLY WANT TO LISTEN TO JOE ROGAN BECAUSE HE TELLS YOU SO MANY LIES ABOUT COVID!!!! PLUS ADDED BONUS RACISM!!!!!
Spending dollars by the tens of millions to attract viewers to people who will lie to them so that you can profit massively—and not because you think they have a message that needs to be heard—is not the first, an exercise of free speech, but rather the second. It is a grift. It is a con. It is hacking the brains of your listeners to their detriment. Daniel Ek at Spotify knows damned well that grabbing an exclusive on Joe Rogan and then trying as hard as they can to boost the number of people he misinforms and whose brains they hack is not “free speech”. But he knows also that he may be able to ride this one out if he can throw enough chaff in the air and get enough useful idiots to say that Spotify is defending free speech by trying to maximally monetize Joe Rogan’s podcast exclusive. And Ben Thompson has fallen for it:
Ben Thompson: Spotify and Joe Rogan, Culture and Principles, Music Versus Podcasts & the Long Run: ‘Ek is right—the slope is slippery—and the fact of the matter is that we are, at least in terms of the elite culture dominated by U.S. media, at the bottom of the hill. Yes, the First Amendment still exists as a law, but it is hard to argue free expression still exists as a value. In other words, while it used to be the case that simply declaring that you were in favor of free speech was enough to tamp down most controversies, particularly in terms of comedians or edgy personalities, today one is quickly mired in the exact sort of muck I noted above, trying to defend broad principles while distancing oneself from specific examples. It’s an impossible dance, and—not to defend any specific instances of speech (here I dance)—I’m not sure we have yet fully internalized the long-term costs of no longer accepting free speech as a blanket principle citable by everyone from cranks to CEOs. One implication of this observation is that Ek perhaps wishes he had realized it in 2020, before Spotify brought Rogan on board; the podcasts where Rogan used a slur were already part of his catalog, and while Spotify may have thought that podcasts that had existed for years without controversy were covered under the sort of “We support free speech” defense that used to be commonplace, the company might have acted differently had it realized that that defense is, in many quarters, no longer valid…
One Video
Aaron Rupar: Marco Rubio’s Incredible Cowardice, in One Video Clip: ‘Trump’s one-time critic now won’t even admit it was wrong for the former president to try to overturn his election loss:
One Picture:
The Roman Empire through time:
Very Briefly Noted:
Oded Galor & Omer Ozak: Land Productivity & Economic Development: Caloric Suitability vs. Agricultural Suitability <https://ideas.repec.org/p/bro/econwp/2015-5.html>
Tom Clark: The UK Is Facing Two Lost Decades on Living Standards: ’Fixing stalled productivity will take time—but government can do more now to help those most in need… <https://www.ft.com/content/7968048a-3f7f-4cb0-8fa1-e10aff14b94c>
Henry Mance: The Last Days of Boris Johnson: ‘This is the slight flaw with delegating all the real work: what happens when there is no one left to be delegated to?… <https://www.ft.com/content/8d5b562b-a074-46a3-8dd4-7d612b58af5e>
Justin Ocean: The $50 Million-&-Up Mansion Club Gets Bigger: ‘Only one sold above that threshold in 2013; the next year saw a flurry of super-high-end sales, but in 2015, $50 million-plus sales fell again to only one, a $57.3 million oceanfront estate in East Hampton…. At least 42 residential properties sold for more than $50 million last year… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-02-05/pursuits-weekly-the-50-million-and-up-mansion-club-gets-bigger?cmpid=BBD020522_PUR>
Rana Foroohar: US Trade Policy Needs a Radical Redesign: ‘Chinese strategy makes it unrealistic to return to the “one world, two systems” vision of the 1990s… <https://www.ft.com/content/1abb98e8-576e-4a42-8c1d-97663f057f7d>
Doug Jones: The World Inside: ‘Tuzo and Jason are two of Earth’s lesser-known continents… <https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/the-world-inside/>
Gideon Rachman: Putin, Ukraine & the Madman Theory of Diplomacy: ‘Western leaders cling to the hope that the Russian leader is bluffing about an invasion… <https://www.ft.com/content/3d8b94e9-0db7-4aa5-ac6a-9fef2ce43ab6>
Michael Tomasky: If Republicans Believe Violence Is “Normal Political Discourse,” Then They Can’t Be Saved: ‘The GOP’s evolution into an organization that explicitly endorses mass political violence is now complete. Can Democrats break from pretending otherwise?… LINK: <https://newrepublic.com/article/165301/republicans-violence-normal-political-discourse>
Doug Jones: Carg’s Home <https://cargshome.wordpress.com/>
David Dayen & Rakeen Mabud: How We Broke the Supply Chain: ‘Rampant outsourcing, financialization, monopolization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics are the culprits… <https://prospect.org/economy/how-we-broke-the-supply-chain-intro/>
Paragraphs:
Barry Ritholtz: 10 Weekend Reads: ‘• Workers Are Having Their Moment. How Long Can It Last? Most workers are benefiting from a tight labor market that developed during the nation’s recovery from Covid–19. Those in highest demand are in some cases the ones who started out further behind, with fewer gains before the pandemic. They include the young and the less educated, as well as those who work in lower-wage industries and perform blue-collar tasks. Many are based in the South. Wealthier, older, college-educated professionals in other parts of the country are also making gains. Wages are rising, and just about anyone who wants a job can get one in certain industries. The demand for labor is not expected to abate anytime soon…
LINK: <https://ritholtz.com/2022/02/10-weekend-reads-24/>
Dan Alpert & David Beckworth: Current Trends & Tensions in the US Economy: ’A post-Keynesian account of the global safe asset shortage, the impact of the US policy response to COVID–19, whether inflation will remain a problem heading into 2022, what’s driving the ‘Great Resignation’, whether capital assets are overvalued, and much more.…
LINK: <https://macromusings.libsyn.com/dan-alpert-on-current-trends-and-tensions-in-the-us-economy>
Zachary D. Carter: The Economy Is Good, Actually: ‘We are living through the best labor market in 50 years. The U.S. economy created 467,000 jobs in January, more than triple the 125,000 that economists had anticipated. According to the most recent data, the economy created 700,000 more jobs at the end of last year than previously believed…. Compared with the federal government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, the recovery from the COVID–19 crash has been an extraordinary success…. It remains difficult to find intellectuals or policy makers eager to take credit for these triumphs. This silence is especially noticeable on the left, which can reasonably claim much of the change in approach as its own…. Most of the conversation about the economy today is not about manufacturing jobs, strike activity, or quit rates. It’s about inflation…. Highlighting the strength of the job market may or may not be a winning message for politicians, but it’s essential for understanding both the calamity we avoided and how to respond…. The Great Recession was a generational cataclysm for the American middle class. The COVID–19 recession has not been, because policy makers have prioritized the benefits of a high-demand economy over the risk of moderately rising prices. They should not be ashamed of their success…
LINK: <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/economy-biden-jobs-good-inflation/621496/>
Alex Armlovich: ‘This NYTimes write-up of MMT is just a dovishly parameterized narrative of standard macro, the New Keynesian synthesis…. Deficits at the ZLB amid large output gap don’t have a social opportunity cost. But this isn’t new…. “Dovishly parameterized” [does] a lot of work in my tweet. Many policymakers’ mental models were calibrated to the behavior of rstar in the mid–90s…. Things really were different in 1995! The world changed & real interest rate behavior changed…
LINK:
Chad Orzel: You Need to Be Lucky AND Good: ‘Legendary former Maryland coach Lefty Driesell…. “Nah, if it was just luck, it would’ve run out by now. You’re still around because you’re good.”… Discourse around career success goes off the rails in two diametrically opposite directions. On the one hand, you have people who insist that it’s all personal talent and hard work…. On the other, there are people who insist that absolutely everything is luck, or more insidiously various types of privilege…. I end up liking the Driesell formulation. Luck is important, but luck runs out. It can get you in the door, but to stick around, let alone open the next door, you also need to be good…
LINK:
John Ganz: Looking for an American Myth: ‘The Right is perhaps a little more self-aware than the Left about attempting to formulate such a myth. Writing in the American Conservative this week, Matthew Schmitz invokes Sam Francis as a guide to the contemporary American Right…. He proposes that a new crop radical right intellectuals has a genuine and organic constituency in the historic core of the conservative movement: It has a deep and abiding base of popular support in what Sam Francis called the “post-bourgeois proletariat,” people who live in, but are not fully part of, our managerial regime…. Francis described the beliefs of the post-bourgeois proletariat…. They show “little attraction to bourgeois conservatism and its emphasis on laissez-faire economics, the rights of property, [and] the minimal state.” These ideas supported and were supported by a bourgeois order that the rise of large organizations—the so-called managerial revolution—has displaced…. Sam Francis is really the clearest and most-honest guide to the present disposition of the Right…. Francis understood this “dispossessed people” in racial terms, and became increasingly explicit about it…. Francis here was borrowing from Georges Sorel, a name whom readers of Unpopular Front will recognize. Sorel believed that political movements required animating myths, which were not rational programs or explicitly articulated ideologies, but expressions of the group’s inner convictions…. I’d argue that the Right already has just such a myth in the stolen election conspiracy theory. It is not subject to refutation with facts and it is primarily the story of dispossession of “the true nation” at the hands of an alien Other…
LINK:
PAID SUBSCRIBER ONLY Content Below: MOAR on Lisa Cook:
Hexapodia Podcast, without Special Guest Lisa Cook:
I must say I am not impressed by the Biden White House’s lining up the Great-&-Good to say nice things about Lisa Cook, a tenured economics professor at a major university in the Midwest, former point staff economist for the White House on the Eurozone side of the Great Recession financial crisis, former Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on development & finance, former HOOVER INSTITUTION NATIONAL FELLOW for Jeebus’ sake, long-time expert on finance, structural change, and growth (with particular focus on Russia before and after Communism), long-time expert on racial and other forms of inequality and their socio-cultural economic supports, and (in a small way: I did not get to Berkeley until she was almost finished with her Ph.D.) my student.
A lot of people who ought to have been making very friendly noises out of the gate… were not:
And so, as what ought to have been a wave of endorsements did not arrive immediately, but instead began to trickle in, somebodies at the Washington Post thought that they could get away with publishing: “[her] peer=reviewed academic writings pertaining to monetary policy”—note, not “her policy-analysis experience pertaining…” or “her work history pertaining…”—”are, to be polite, thin…. But she strokes progressivism’s erogenous zones…”
“She strokes progressivism’s erogenous zones.”
Those who grew up at Bill Buckley’s knee know well how to call a Black woman a whore in a way just genteel enough that they can afterwards claim that was not what they meant at all.
But I see you, Washington Post.
I see you, George F. Will.
Grave moral fault attaches to anyone who pays any monies to the Washington Post, or provides it with anything of value. Grave moral fault attaches to anyone who receives George F. Will in any form of polite, or impolite, society.
Just saying…
I think that the First Amendment might be nearing the same crossroads that engendered critical race theory. Between 1954 (ish) and 2005 (ish), we regulated racial issues with the nondiscrimination principle. This was the right move in its time, when the problem was Jim Crow, and we could turn legal formalism against it. But things have changed, and we've seen that nondiscrimination doesn't work any more. Indeed, formal nondiscrimination has been weaponized by the neo-Confederates.
I would submit that the same is true for modern First Amendment jurisprudence, born of the McCarthy Red Scare--also around 1954-ish. It was another dream of legal formalism, adapted to the problems of its time. But it relied on reasonably responsible mass media and a norm that political discourse would match legal discourse--intentionally misleading, but not intentionally false. With the erosion of norms against lying and the emergence of Murdoch's Völkischer Beobachter, this predicate is gone, and the First Amendment has been weaponized by the neo-Confederates.
(Additionally, the public-private distinction scoping the First Amendment is less applicable these days. Monopolies with shunning power are a bit too close to Leviathan for my comfort.)
Since the federal courts are now run by the neo-Confederates, there's not much that can be done about this--at least in the short run. But we might want to reexamine our notions of free expression. Legally, DeLong is correct and Thompson is wrong. But Thompson might be the future.