[contextly_auto_sidebar id="hcxWCofPNmshtu5V4mfeJWMEKeMUb4SZ"] I REMAIN a dedicated fan of the Gray Lady, but its recent pieces looking for some "good news" in the Amazon fight struck me as bit strange. Today I respond in a post for Salon. It begins this way: In the careful-what-you-wish-for department: A bit more than a week ago, the New York Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, urged … [Read more...]
Is Amazon a Monopoly?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="QUacYyetZUphAZnyUIQyaD8AKTam7LBQ"] THE battle over Amazon -- including the siege of Hachette -- has heated up lately, with The New Republic's Franklin Foer and several prominent authors, including Ursula Le Guin, calling the online bookseller "a monopoly." Foer has argued that it's time for the Department of Justice to break Amazon up. This is from his TNR piece, … [Read more...]
Are We Really in a Gutenberg Moment?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="n4bv9MRmUDoFtO6zdRvCDUwfVj0rxy5C"] OFTEN these days, we hear that the shift from the analog world of print to the online and digital world resembles what happened when Gutenberg's printing press reshaped Renaissance Europe, crushing Catholicism, spreading literacy and perhaps democracy, and overturning old ways. People who frame our current transition this way often … [Read more...]
Switching Sides in the Digital War
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="eJnmz4EFyiZtMYvvDKNPqiDekKwUDUR1"] DIDN'T we hear about how great it was going to be? Those early days, when we were told how funky and non-commercial and liberating the Web was going to be, now seem like ancient history. One writer who believed in the promise of the Internet in the early days has come to see what a much more complex issue the digital revolution … [Read more...]
Journalism’s Phony Golden Age
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="v0eG90rPghAVd66MQLAYaRsKRNlqKbJ4"] IT was only, I guess, a matter of time before the digital utopians started telling us -- including laid off scribes -- how great journalism has gotten. The latest is a Wired piece, "How the Smartphone Ushered in a Golden Age of Journalism. (It's venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and not the Wired writer, who calls it a "golden … [Read more...]
Will Indie Film Survive?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="u8nyNEUGiw9T3t2MS4otkepc3HaoApPt"] ONE of the casualties of our current cultural situation is the erosion of the middle -- the middle class, the midlist author, the middlebrow, and the mid-budget film. Independent film, with its interest in boundary pushing and risk-taking, may not seem to belong in that company, but it's vulnerable to all the same forces. The New … [Read more...]
The “Antifree” Movement Takes on “Free”
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="hMpJwAX7ROFisoxfaiwhWpOQbmzRcRS5"] BY now, we're all pretty familiar with the information-wants-to-be-free argument, and if you write for a living, or have had to endure numerous unpaid internships to break into a creative field, you know it all too well. A wide-ranging, perceptive, and slightly arch essay in the hip Brooklyn journal n+1 sketches out the … [Read more...]
“Is Spotify Killing Music?”
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="AJwkTxpSjSsEeL7n5JFPH23s6m8blcVb"] TWO descendants of Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck make a good illustration of what's happened to the lives of musicians lately. A new story -- co-written by yours truly -- up on TakePart looks at how musicians are being proletarianized, and I don't just mean the lyrics. The story -- written with Kathleen Sharp -- weaves between … [Read more...]
The Downside of Freelance Nation
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="Xdew9ZyDPnPc00sNxT9gh2myS9uRknrk"] WITH all the hype around the go-it-alone/ "free-agent" lifestyle and the new economy, it's refreshing to see a sober, well-balance piece about making a living as a freelancer. Though it's not specifically about the creative class, Tiffany Hsu's story on freelancers and the "gray economy" in California is crucial to understanding … [Read more...]
Silicon Valley’s New Robber Barons
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="EgEeltgVhbdrJtpZgu1Pc9OkKclq7k1w"] THERE'S a very fine new piece in the August Harper's in which Rebecca Solnit draws a straight line between the 19th century robber barons and Silicon Valley's cyber-utopians. The common denominator, she writes, is Stanford University. The relationship between the early kings of the railroads -- who were given free reign across much … [Read more...]