Tech billionaires: I’m going to live forever so I have to figure out how to get all the money in the world for myself by taking it away from everyone else. Me, me, me, I, myself, me, I, me, myself, me and not you
A lot of the sci-fi of the era was based off of the assumption that corporate power would rise to rival that of governments. That runaway capitalism would birth “high-tech low-life” as the state of society at large. Yes, the stars are aligning between the interests of the powerful in the present, and the future postulated in those stories; those stories were made on the basis of human nature and self-reflections on the contemporary. They are being proven right because they assumed plausible futures with likely outcomes. Want a solar punk world? We have to buck the trend and disrupt the trajectory we’re on now. Will we have pivotal moment like that of Americana circa 1929, or slide further in a hellscape? I know what future I want but I don’t know if we’re going to get it.
All I want is for one of these super rich fucks to start obsessing about preserving Earth and building massive carbon capture plants that also generate clean drinking water from the air. Dump billions into pulse fusion reactors and build them into every carbon capture plant. Create a stable biodome...right here, on Earth. And use the entire planet for the experiment. Can someone please get on that?
Read Asimov’s Robots series. !Stop at Asimov’s Robots series! I want Daneel damn it! We could use a Demerzel but not the rest of Foundation or the Galactic authoritarian nonsense.
So we are heading toward three streaming channels, basically cbs, nbc, abc, but instead of OTA and free with ads, it will be 20/month each with ads. All the utter crap on cable nobody wanted to watch, (100 channels with nothing on) will instead be ready to stream on demand. Well done shitty end stage capitalism, well done.
While the business has reckoned with more seismic deals in recent years, among them Disney-Fox and AT&T-Time Warner, this time the reality seems to be dawning that bigger is not always better. Streaming platforms swim in red ink and legacy media assets (mainly linear TV) are eroding. Yes, Zaslav has hinted at opportunities to be had, but WBD was not really considered a buyer given its oft-stated focus on reducing its enormous debt. It’s not clear how trying to swallow a company with hefty debt of its own solves any problems.
Before I say anything, I am against the merger. However as far as streaming goes, having a monopoly on content makes a streaming platform inherently better. WBD isn’t betting on being the most successful streaming platform, it’s betting on every other streaming platform that can’t compete with Zaslav buying everything.
The best tv and movie streaming platform in history, Netflix circa mid-2010s, had no monopoly on content whatsoever. All these studios trying to monopolize their content onto their own streaming services has only made streaming worse.
Absolutely. I wasn’t saying Netflix was at any point morally right, and the rise of the Netflix original was definitely part of the beginning of the end of paid legal streaming being a good experience for the viewer.
the only streamers were Netflix and Hulu? When anything you wanted to stream was on one or the other? Otherwise known as a duopoly. It’s like how the PC gaming marketplace was objectively at it’s best when Steam had a monopoly on selling games. Having everything in one place is better.
Streaming will get better, everything else will get worse as the monopolies get to full power again.
Netflix had a near monopoly on the streaming but not on the actual shows and movies. All the studios still owned their shows and movies and could unilaterally pull them off Netflix and make their own services, evidenced by the fact that that’s exactly what they did. Importantly, the monopoly was not vertically integrated. Similarly, Valve makes very few of the games available on Steam.
Streaming will not get better as the studios fully monopolize it. Not without at the very least and most liberal an enforced ban on vertical integration in visual media and on exclusive licensing agreements. That won’t happen under capitalism though, so the only real improvement will be in the resurgence of piracy.
The current head of the FTC is bringing the first anti-trust case in many years. She’s launched cases against Google, and Amazon so far, and is investigating Facebook. That gives me some hope.
Such a deal would likely attract less regulatory scrutiny than other potential mergers, with WBD lacking any domestic broadcast network, and with mostly synergistic businesses. The biggest source of friction would likely be combining the two legacy film and TV studios.
It’ll be interesting to see how the Fediverse moves forward without direct monetization.
We’ve seen Usenet become more of a niche platform because it’s hard to monetize. Meanwhile, the popular social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) are dripping in ads, which make it easier for them to build and maintain developer teams.
I want the Fediverse to succeed, but I have a hard time seeing how it can compete for average users without paid developer hours.
The development of New Exciting Features™ will probably be slower on nonprofit systems, but the enormous costs of moderation will be effectively zero, while simultaneously improving in quality. My prediction for what we’ll eventually see is “fun” ad-supported commercial platforms (assuming they can afford moderation), and a somewhat more “serious” discussion-based Fediverse.
“Basically, we’re in the process of replacing our whole social back-end with ActivityPub,” says Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. “I think Flipboard is going to be the first mainstream consumer service that existed in a walled garden that switches over to ActivityPub.”
I was the same. I started listing to podcasts in about 2007, it wasn’t until 2018 I started listening to a Star Trek pod. Ben and Adam are my personal recommendation because they A. Are funny B. Go episode by episode, giving the show a really followable structure C. Used to be film production professionals and pick up on techniques that even I, a fellow film production professional, don’t notice.
They love trek, but will happily rip the arse out of it when deserved.
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