Category: Silicon Valley Propagandistas

@TheEconomist: The flywheel delusion: Uber, DoorDash and similar firms can’t defy the laws of capitalism after all

The mania over ride-sharing and delivery companies has at times been absurd

IN THE REAL WORLD a flywheel is a mechanical contraption that stores rotational energy. In Silicon Valley it has come to mean something else: a perpetual-motion business that not only runs forever but is self-reinforcing. Thanks to powerful network effects, the theory goes, a digital platform becomes more attractive as it draws in more users, which makes it even more attractive and so on. The end state is a venture that has gathered enough energy to self-levitate and throw off tons of cash.

The payout on one of the most richly-funded bets of the past decade or so revolves around whether ride-sharing and delivery firms—which once were part of something known as the “sharing economy” but are better described as the “flywheel economy”—can actually ever live up to their heady promise.

Read the post on The Economist

@andreworlowski: Lucky Canada. Google chooses Toronto as site of posthuman urban lab. Town has an API, but no cars

[Editor Charlie sez: Welcome to the Goo town–the end of privacy.  This is how they force you to get rid of independent travel.]

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store

16 Tons, written by Merle Travis

Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs venture has chosen Toronto as its urban laboratory – one in which humans may ultimately be optional.

Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff has fantasised how convenient a city would be without people.

Google won’t take over the entire city – at least not just yet. It’s opted to redevelop 12 acres of the the city’s waterfront, with 800 acres sitting idle next door – a space the size of Venice. Sidewalk describes it as “the first neighbourhood from the internet up” and “a neighbourhood built as an urban innovation platform”, one that will be “a fully Google-fied neighbourhood” in the words of WiReD mag, which admits that there’s an element of “Minority Report” dystopia to the plans.

Data rules in the Googlezone, with everything monitored and analysed. It’s what Google calls “the programmable public realm”.

“Building on a robust system of asset monitoring, Sidewalk can make areas of the public realm reservable for a wide range of temporary uses without impinging on the public’s overall needs,” the company burbles. Following the modern urban prejudice against automobiles, only self-driving vehicles (“taxibots” and “vanbots”) and car-sharing rides will be permitted in the Googlezone. But it will have an API.

Read the post on The Register

Content Creators Coalition (c3) Warns Congress About Artist And Songwriter Opposition To “Transparency in Music Licensing and Ownership Act”

PRESS RELEASE 

September 22nd, 2017

Content Creators Coalition (c3) Warns Congress About Artist And Songwriter Opposition To “Transparency in Music Licensing and Ownership Act”

Washington, D.C. – The Content Creators Coalition (c3) today sent the following letter to the leaders of the House Judiciary Committee warning that consideration of H.R. 3350, the so called “Transparency in Music Licensing and Ownership Act,” would spark a backlash in the artist community and could derail the Committee’s work to create a consensus copyright reform legislation:

The Honorable Bob Goodlatte, Chairman
The Honorable John Conyers, Jr., Ranking Member
House Committee on the Judiciary
2138 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Chairman Goodlatte and Ranking Member Conyers:

As an artist and songwriter-run advocacy organization, we write to express our strong opposition to H.R. 3350, the “Transparency in Music Licensing and Ownership Act.”  Recognizing the importance of this issue to our constituents, this letter is signed by every member of our Executive Board.

The Content Creators’ Coalition (c3) strongly supports the Committee’s continual efforts to find consensus around broader copyright reform and to ensure that music licensing is more transparent, particularly to third party beneficiaries of recording contracts.  There is little dispute among stakeholders that music licensing, in particular the licensing of musical works, is needlessly opaque.  Publishers and record labels agree on this point, as do songwriters, performers and musicians, as well as music servicers and businesses who use music and musical works.  There is clearly an opportunity for the Committee to find consensus on these issues.

However, H.R. 3350 does not further efforts to reach consensus – instead, it represents a one-sided approach that would fail to simplify music licensing.  We are deeply concerned about the bill’s onerous registration system and financial penalty (forfeiture of statutory damages and attorneys’ fees) for songwriters or publishers who fail to register their works in a new database, created and run by the government.

As a matter of principle, an intellectual property right, like any other property right, should not be subject to forfeiture and the law should help creators understand and protect their rights – not create obstacles courses for them to navigate on pain of losing control over their creative work.  This bill, by contrast, actually incentivizes the appropriation of creators’ work based on technical or other often innocent shortcomings, removing key deterrents that should discourage music services from doing so.

The record keeping mandates in the bill are voluminous and incredibly vague. Terms like “catalog number” are undefined and could mean a number of things. Other requirements are intricate, time consuming and in many cases, appear impossible to satisfy.  How is an artist supposed to register every album on which one of her songs has been recorded, including recordings by other artists they may not even know about?  If these requirements are time consuming and uncertain for successful and well-known songwriters and publishers, they will be impossible for independent songwriters.

Most importantly, the bill also thwarts the Committee’s to create a consensus copyright reform legislation. Both the “Fair Play Fair Pay Act,” creating a terrestrial performance right in the United States, and the “CLASSICS Act,” have support from music creators and digital service providers.  While we respect the long standing and good faith efforts of Chairman Sensenbrenner to address these issues, H.R. 3350 only enjoys the support of businesses that use music and is so lopsided it would be a toxic “poison pill” in any copyright reform legislation effort.

We urge the Committee to reject H.R. 3350 and to press ahead at full speed with more genuine music licensing reform.  Thank you for considering our views.

Melvin Gibbs, President

John McCrea, Vice President

Tommy Manzi, Treasurer

Rosanne Cash

Tift Merritt

Matthew Montfort

Jeffrey Boxer, Executive Director

 

cc: The Honorable Daryl Issa
The Honorable Jerrold Nadler

@andreworlowski: Google, propaganda, and the new New Man

Google has begun to infuse American TV and movies shows with propaganda – “good propaganda”, the company insists. However, it’s unlikely to please two groups who rarely agree on anything: those who think Google isn’t diverse enough, and conservatives who fear its political and media power.

So far, Google’s “interventions” have so far been limited to making computer geeks appear more attractive. For example, following Google’s advice, a greater proportion of programmers portrayed will be women, rather than guys in hoodies. Shows apparently benefitting from the Google touch include Halt and Catch Fire, and the sitcom Silicon Valley. And expect more of the usual homilies to “learn to code” – another more subtle form of indoctrination.

President Obama was kept up to date on the efforts. White House logs show that he met both Google’s co-ordinator, media program manager Julie Ann Crommett, and the academics Google funded to study the initiative, Professor Stacy Smith at USC Annenberg, a prominent commentator on gender issues.

Diversity campaigners and conservatives have good reason to be wary when Google inserts itself in the business of mass communication. Let’s take each case in turn.

Read the post on The Register