|
Top-level
 Now, this wasn't always *quite* so obvious. Back when Vice was falling for Facebook's "pivot to video," it wasn't *completely* obvious that the long con was to take your audience hostage and ransom them back to you. But *deliberately* organizing your business to be reliant on social media barons *today*? It's like trusting your money to Sam Bankman-Fried...in 2024. 13/ 13 comments | Expand all CWs
encourage 15/ The most bonkers part of this strategy is that it's coming from private equity bosses, who laud themselves as the great strategists of the 21st century, whose claim on so much of our global capital and resources is derived from their brilliant insight, which allows them to buy "distressed assets" like Vice, "restructure" them to find "efficiencies" and sell them on. 16/ The reality is that PE goons - like other financiers - are basically herding animals. *Everyone's* hit on the tactic of buying up beloved media companies - from the 150-year-old *Popular Science* to modern publications like CNet - and then filling them with spammy garbage in the hopes that Google will fail to notice and continue to award them pride-of-place on search results pages: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task 17/ The fact that these billionaire brain-geniuses can't figure out how to "turn around" a site whose workers a) produce brilliant, popular, successful work; and b) depart to found successful firms that commercialize that work tells you everything about their ability to spot "a good business opportunity." 18/ PE - like other mafiosi - only have one business-plan, the "bust out," where you invade a business that produces useful things, force them to pay your chosen suppliers sky-high fees for things they don't need, extract massive fees for your "management" and then walk away from the collapse: https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben 19/ I'm on tour with my new novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me TONIGHT in LA with @adamconover at Vroman's, then on MONDAY in SEATTLE with Neal Stephenson (Feb 26, Third Place Books). After that, it's Portland, Phoenix, Tucson, Anaheim and more! https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour eof/  Parasites infect both healthy and unhealthy hosts. They alter their host organisms to suit the parasite. https://www.snexplores.org/article/parasitic-worms-alter-body-inflammation-immune-system-treatment In another example, vampire bats have similar strategies as hedge fund managers, of "feed & fly off". Although in the case of Chris Hohn, it's more "feed & eff off". Modern hedge fund managers are like chop shops. @pluralistic Drink!   @pluralistic I'm definitely moving in this direction. I didn't think I'd return to WP-style blogging as a format, but until I can investigate other options, it's familiar and comfortable and under my control.  |
Gregory's Server
If there was ever a moment when the obvious, catastrophic, imminent risk of trusting Big Tech intermediaries to sit between you and your customers or audience, it was now. This is *not* the moment to be "social first." This is the moment for POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere), a strategy that sees social media as a strategy for bringing readers to channels that *you* control:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/#two-much-posse
14/