{"id":1352,"date":"2014-06-17T21:08:17","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T04:08:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/?p=1352"},"modified":"2014-06-17T21:08:17","modified_gmt":"2014-06-18T04:08:17","slug":"summer-books-astra-taylors-the-peoples-platform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/06\/summer-books-astra-taylors-the-peoples-platform\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer books: Astra Taylor&#8217;s &#8216;The People&#8217;s Platform&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Astra-Taylor.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1354\" src=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Astra-Taylor.jpg\" alt=\"Astra Taylor\" width=\"186\" height=\"284\" \/><\/a>Summer is time to catch up on reading all of those books I bought during the school year. Let&#8217;s begin with Astra Taylor, <a href=\"http:\/\/us.macmillan.com\/book.aspx?isbn=9780805093568\"><em>The People&#8217;s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I enjoyed the book, political economy applied to the contemporary digital media world. It covers a lot of topics, from search engines to copyright to video to technological innovation to the regulatory process, in lively prose. I learned a lot, and was directed to many references I am anxious to look up.<\/p>\n<p>Attracting the most heat from Taylor are what we might call the internet utopians, whose visions of free culture for everybody everywhere, transforming the world, never came to pass, and whose remarks from a decade or so ago provide an almost too easy target.<\/p>\n<p>What did they get wrong? That there are aspects of the economics of industry that did not change with the internet. To name a few:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8216;Distribution&#8217; is a sector characterized by very large returns to scale, thus leading to concentration in a small number of large firms. This is as true of carbonated beverages as it is of movies, books and songs, and now such things as search engines and social networks.<\/li>\n<li>Distribution of cultural content can be profitable when used as a device to attract advertisers.<\/li>\n<li>For cultural goods, which are &#8216;experience goods&#8217;, we expect information cascades &#8211; we are influenced by what everybody else is reading, or listening to, because that provides us with some useful (though not fail-safe) information about the quality of those goods.<\/li>\n<li>The arts, especially those where there is low-cost reproduction &#8211; e.g. books, recordings, videos &#8211; will have a few superstar artists and many struggling ones, since consumers will want to buy from the best, even if it costs a few dollars more.<\/li>\n<li>Because the production of books, song recordings, videos, images, is subject to very high fixed costs but low, near-zero marginal costs for copies, there will be large rents created for popular products, with creators, producers, distributors, retailers and consumers all wanting as big a share of the rents as they can get.<\/li>\n<li>Live performance is subject to cost disease.<\/li>\n<li>Copyright has the challenge of finding a balance, across many genres and changing technology, between incentives for creators and access for users.<\/li>\n<li>The political process is subject to the logic of collective action, such that the side of an industry with a few, very large players will organize to exert much more influence on policy than the side of the industry (usually the consumers) who number in the millions, and all have relatively small amounts at stake, even if in aggregate the small amounts add up to a vast sum.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Each of these issues are ones I could have included in a course on the economics of the arts twenty years ago, and would still include today. Of course the internet changes things &#8211; more people will read this meager blog post than I ever could have got to read a short book review twenty years ago &#8211; but it doesn&#8217;t change the fundamentals of information and cultural goods.<\/p>\n<p>My main question for the author, then, arises from this very fact that she does seem to recognize: what <em>can<\/em> be done to make for a more democratic cultural world? I do not believe much can be done to change that list of bullet points above. I can criticize certain policies &#8211; I agree with the author that the continual extension of copyright term is bad policy, for example &#8211; but what are we really after here? She writes (pp. 126-7):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Cultural democracy means that a diversity of voices and viewpoints is expressed and accessible; that visibility and notoriety should not be the consequence of cumulative advantage alone; and that influence within the cultural field is achieved by a variety of factors, not simply ceded to those who can afford to pay to be seen and heard.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Then I too am a fan of cultural democracy. But I was left unconvinced that there were policy solutions waiting to be picked up, such that we can &#8216;take back power and culture.&#8217; To be fair, Astra Taylor never suggests that any of her hopes would be easy to achieve, and she takes care to recognize the challenges. But I did not finish the book with a clear sense of direction. We can dislike much of what comes out of Silicon Valley, strategies and pronouncements. But where do we go from here, in terms of feasible cultural policy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Summer is time to catch up on reading all of those books I bought during the school year. Let&#8217;s begin with Astra Taylor, The People&#8217;s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. I enjoyed the book, political economy applied to the contemporary digital media world. It covers a lot of topics, from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1354,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1352","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-issues","8":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Astra-Taylor.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3dIW5-lO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1418,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/07\/summer-books-brad-stones-the-everything-store\/","url_meta":{"origin":1352,"position":0},"title":"Summer books: Brad Stone&#8217;s &#8216;The Everything Store&#8217;","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"July 17, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"In the past few months there are few businesses that have come in for such vilification as Amazon.com - including in many of the stories and blogs here at artsjournal.com - and so Brad Stone's book, subtitled 'Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon', is timely, to say the least.\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 3 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 3 comments","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/07\/summer-books-brad-stones-the-everything-store\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"a difficult case","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/everything-store-193x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1380,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/06\/summer-books-bruce-katz-and-jennifer-bradleys-the-metropolitan-revolution\/","url_meta":{"origin":1352,"position":1},"title":"Summer books: Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley&#8217;s &#8216;The Metropolitan Revolution&#8217;","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"June 28, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"A dozen years ago, mayors and their economic development staff made sure they had a copy of Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class on their desks. It was the big new idea that would help them understand the dynamics of contemporary urban growth, and plan for the future\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;issues&quot;","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"next big thing?","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/metropolitan-revolution-196x300.jpeg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1982,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2016\/02\/is-there-a-canadian-cultural-policy-crisis\/","url_meta":{"origin":1352,"position":2},"title":"Is there a Canadian cultural policy crisis?","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"February 13, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"At the Globe and Mail, Kate Taylor writes: The policy tools that have protected and nurtured Canada\u2019s cultural industries since the 1970s are unknown to transnational distributors of foreign content \u2013 that would be Google, YouTube and Netflix \u2013 while Canadian consumers are increasingly sidestepping the domestic distributors who, whether\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;issues&quot;","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"a childhood favourite","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/paddle-to-the-sea.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2696,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2021\/07\/about-that-french-culture-pass\/","url_meta":{"origin":1352,"position":3},"title":"About that French Culture Pass&#8230;","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"July 29, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"The French government had the idea to give teenagers a 300 Euro credit (through a phone app) to spend on \"culture\". A few limits were placed upon it - a 100 Euro maximum on online subscriptions, and any video games had to be French (trade protectionism is a given in\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 9 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 9 comments","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2021\/07\/about-that-french-culture-pass\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/shinji.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/shinji.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/shinji.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/shinji.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1371,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2014\/06\/fixed-book-prices\/","url_meta":{"origin":1352,"position":4},"title":"Fixed book prices (updated)","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"June 27, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"France has passed anti-Amazon legislation. Publishing Perspectives reports: On Wednesday, the French parliament passed a long-debated law that will end Amazon.com\u2019s ability to offer a combined 5% discount and free shipping on books shipped to France, according to\u00a0Livres Hebdo.\u00a0 France\u2019s fixed book price law, dubbed \u201cThe Lang Law,\u201d was passed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;issues&quot;","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"paid full price","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/french-reader.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4607,"url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/2025\/11\/we-dont-need-an-alt-cultural-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":1352,"position":5},"title":"We Don&#8217;t Need an Alt Cultural Policy","author":"Michael Rushton","date":"November 4, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"In\u00a0a recent post\u00a0comparing the White House\u2019s proposed \u201ccompact\u201d with universities to the situation facing the nonprofit arts in the United States, I wrote: The administration\u2019s interventions into the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian museums have received a lot of press, and these \u201canti-woke\u201d interventions have a lot in common with\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;issues&quot;","block_context":{"text":"issues","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/category\/issues\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/image.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/image.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/image.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/image.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/image.png?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/image.png?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/worth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}