Astra Taylor Quotes

Of course false-rape allegations have happened. My friend Astra Taylor points out that the most dramatic examples in this country were when white men falsely accused Black men of assaulting white women. Which means that if you want to be indignant on the subject, you’ll need to summon up a more complicated picture of how power, blame, and mendacity actually work. (“Feminism: The Men Arrive”)

Oh, Astrae, we have kept you too safe if it is us that you fear.

MPAA. The idea that piracy is an effective form of resistance, a direct attack on the corporate empire, is confirmed by the reaction it has provoked:

When I look at all the forces aligned to roll back and block democratic change--the concentration of wealth, the structures of minority rule, the market imperative of endless growth, the seemingly irrepressible appeal of racism, and the rapidity of climate change--I feel my will weaken. Given the magnitude of the task at hand, how can people like me possibly make a dent? The established order is so big and powerful, and a single individual so vulnerable and small. But when I engage my intellect, something approaching optimism is possible. The past is proof that it can be done,

The rub is that over the intervening years we have somehow deceived ourselves into believing that this state of insecurity and inequity is a form of liberation.

How valiant to deny the importance of money when it is had in abundance.

At present, the United States occupies the worst of both media worlds, lacking either a competitive market or meaningful government investment or oversight.

In fact, wealth and power are shifting to those who control the platforms on which all of us create, consume, and connect.

Networks do not eradicate power: they distribute it in different ways, shuffling hierarchies and producing new mechanisms of exclusion.

while piracy signifies “a repudiation of information capitalism at one extreme,” it marks information capitalism’s “consummation” on the other.

For all its flaws, copyright provides some incentive for people to take on the risk of creating new work by allowing for the possibility of some economic benefit.

New media companies look remarkably like the old ones they aspire to replace: male, pale, and privileged.

The problem with foreign oligarchs isn't that they're foreign, but that they're oligarchs.

Instead, the commons were as much a thing and an activity, both a noun and a verb—a set of social relationships, a bundle of rights and restrictions, a mode of being for mutual aid.

Jeff Hammerbacher, a software coder and one of Facebook’s early hires, succinctly said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.

What kind of ancestors do we want to be? With every action or inaction, we help decide how the future will unfold. What principles and commitments do we want to adopt for a democracy that doesn't yet exist? How will we cast our votes for a society we won't live to see?

There is no such thing as a public Internet: everything flows through private pipes. However, using the Internet for the consumption of culture or to search for information is nearly as essential to participating in modern life as having electricity or plumbing in your home

Alice Marwick, an anthropologist who did her fieldwork studying the tech scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, argues that new communication technologies reflect the individualist and status-conscious values of the competitive, commercial milieu in which they were developed.

Giving people what they want reduces us to consumers instead of treating us like citizens, consumers who are on the prowl for the predictable and comfortable. What we want winds up being suspiciously like what we’ve already got, more of the same—the cultural equivalent of a warm bath.

No more Boston! This comes on the heels of Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that Miami’s days are numbered: apparently that city is projected to be underwater in “a few years.” And Astra Taylor warns that the flooding of coastal cities and even inland towns and farms may force people to “escape to New Zealand, to the moon, or to Mars.”12 But here’s an anomaly. The Obamas recently acquired property in Martha’s Vineyard for nearly $12 million.13 Very interesting! The property, purchased from the owner of the Boston Celtics, doesn’t merely have ocean views; it sits right on the Atlantic Ocean. The Obamas know about the literature on disappearing coastlines. Obama himself has repeatedly warned of rising sea levels engulfing coastal properties. And presumably everyone who lives on the coasts has access to this literature and has heard these dire warnings.

They speak about openness, transparency, and participation, and these terms now define our highest ideals, our conception of what is good and desirable, for the future of media in a networked age. But these ideals are not sufficient if we want to build a more democratic and durable digital culture. Openness, in particular, is not necessarily progressive. While the Internet creates space for many voices, the openness of the Web reflects and even amplifies real-world inequities as often as it ameliorates them.

wealth and power are shifting to those who control the platforms on which all of us create, consume, and connect. The companies that provide these and related services are quickly becoming the Disneys of the digital world—monoliths hungry for quarterly profits, answerable to their shareholders not us, their users, and more influential, more ubiquitous, and more insinuated into the fabric of our everyday lives than Mickey Mouse ever was. As such they pose a whole new set of challenges to the health of our culture.

Those who applaud social production and networked amateurism, the colorful cacophony that is the Internet, and the creative capacities of everyday people to produce entertaining and enlightening things online, are right to marvel. There is amazing inventiveness, boundless talent and ability, and overwhelming generosity on display. Where they go wrong is thinking that the Internet is an egalitarian, let alone revolutionary, platform for our self-expression and development, that being able to shout into the digital torrent is adequate for democracy.

The weightless rhetoric of digital technology masks a refusal to acknowledge the people and resources on which these systems depend: lithium and coltan mines, energy-guzzling data centers and server farms, suicidal workers at Apple’s Foxconn factories, and women and children in developing countries and incarcerated Americans up to their necks in toxic electronic waste.2 The swelling demand for precious metals, used in everything from video-game consoles to USB cables to batteries, has increased political instability in some regions, led to unsafe, unhealthy, and inhumane working conditions, opened up new markets for child and forced labor, and encouraged environmentally destructive extraction techniques.3 It is estimated that mining the gold necessary to produce a single cell phone—only one mineral of many required for the finished product—produces upward of 220 pounds of waste.4

Instead of distinct old and new media, what we have is a complex cultural ecosystem that spans the analog and digital, encompassing physical places and online spaces, material objects and digital copies, flesh bodies and virtual identities.

There is a note of truth in the idea that adversity fuels creativity, but when reduced to an economic truism - a decline in industry profitability won't hurt artistic production because artists will work for beer - the notion rings not just hollow but obscene.

This, as the media critic and filmmaker Astra Taylor has pointed out, is digital feudalism. She writes that “sites like Facebook and Tumblr offer up land for content providers to work while platform owners expropriate value with impunity.

More robust public support for the fourth estate would produce even greater freedom and diversity. In direct contradiction of stereotypes about the chilling effects of “state-controlled media,” countries enjoying such support are home to an unimpeded and vibrant press.

The Internet might be a wonderful thing, but you can’t crowdsource a relationship with a terrorist or a whistle-blower.

Instead of distinct old and new media, what we have is a complex cultural ecosystem that spans the analog and digital, encompassing physical places and online spaces, material objects and digital copies, fleshy bodies and virtual identities.

The state is painted largely as a source of problematic authority, while private enterprise is given a free pass; democracy, fuzzily defined, is attained through “sharing,” “collaboration,” “innovation,” and “disruption.

However imprecisely the terms are applied, the dichotomy of open versus closed (sometimes presented as freedom versus control) provides the conceptual framework that increasingly underpins much of the current thinking about technology, media, and culture.

this is the epitome of what communications scholar Henry Jenkins calls “convergence culture”—the melding of old and new media that the telecom giants have long been looking forward to, for it portends a future where all activity flows through their pipes. But it also represents a broader blurring of boundaries: communal spirit and capitalist spunk, play and work, production and consumption, making and marketing, editorializing and advertising, participation and publicity, the commons and commerce.

if there is no opposition—no distinction between noncommercial and commercial, public and private, independent and mainstream—it is because co-optation has been absolute.

The great virtue of the Internet is that it erodes power,” the influential technologist Esther Dyson said. “It sucks power out of the center, and takes it to the periphery, it erodes the power of institutions over people while giving to individuals the power to run their lives.”26 The problem, though, is that disintermediation has not lived up to its potential.

In the realm of media and culture, the uncomfortable truth is that the information age has been accompanied by increasing consolidation and centralization, a process aided by the embrace of openness as a guiding ideal.

Instead of leveling the field between small and large, the open Internet has dramatically tilted it in favor of the most massive players.

Monopolies, contrary to early expectations, prosper online, where winner-take-all markets emerge partly as a consequence of Metcalfe’s law, which says that the value of a network increases exponentially by the number of connections or users:

While we like to imagine the Internet as a radical, uncontrollable force—it’s often said the system was designed to survive a nuclear attack—it is in fact vulnerable to capture by the private interests we depend on for access.

While an open network ensures the equal treatment of all data—something undoubtedly essential for a democratic networked society—it does not sweep away all the problems of the old-media model, failing to adequately address the commercialization and consolidation of the digital sphere.

new technologies do not emerge in a vacuum free of social, political, and economic influences. Context is all-important. On their own, labor-saving machines, however ingenious, are not enough to bring about a society of abundance and leisure, as the Luddites who destroyed the power looms set to replace them over two centuries ago knew all too well.

New technologies are hailed for enabling us to “organize without organizations,” which are condemned as rigid and suffocating and antithetical to the open architecture of the Internet.

Where earlier visionaries prophesied a world in which increased leisure allowed all human beings the well-being and security to freely cultivate their creative instincts, the apostles of the creative class collapse labor into leisure and exploitation into self-expression,

Thus the ideal worker matches the traditional profile of the enthusiastic virtuoso: an individual who is versatile and rootless, inventive and adaptable; who self-motivates and works long hours, tapping internal and external resources;

as a thorough study by University of Chicago sociologist James Evans published in the esteemed journal Science revealed, online academic databases tend to amplify new and

already popular material, reducing the number of articles researchers cited and “narrowing” scholarship compared to paper databases. As the number of sources available online broadened, fewer journals and articles were cited, those that were cited were more recent, and citations were connected to fewer sources.

That’s what the techno-optimists would have us believe, dismissing potential solutions as threats to Internet freedom and forceful interference in a “natural” distribution pattern.

But the defeat, touted as a victory of civil society, was also a sign of the tech industry’s growing clout. For the first time, new and old media are spending similar sums to buy influence in Washington.

There are many peer-to-peer file-sharing Web sites, but the Pirate Bay has been the most outspoken and conscientious about connecting freedom to share with freedom of speech. The site’s high-profile lawsuit made it an international cause célèbre, spawning political Pirate Parties around the world.

The enthusiasm for pirate politics keeps spreading, particularly through academic circles, with a number of scholars writing elegies to “pirate philosophy.” Pirate “practices exceed the limit of individual production and succeed in so far as there is a collective accumulation of knowledge to be shared” and “offer an alternative way to relate to the cultural artifacts,” says one media theorist.

Those who would protect the cultural commons must see that the challenge is not only copyright, but those who own the platforms and channels through which culture is increasingly shared.

The commons can be commodified without being enclosed outright.

copyleft,” as the free culture position on copyright is sometimes called, is not “left” in the traditional sense.

Copyleft, with its narrow emphasis on software freedom, even when broadened to underscore the freedom of speech implications of such a position, offers a limited political response to entrenched systems of economic privilege, and it does not advance limits on profitability or promote fair compensation.

Ostrom and Hess challenge this view. We are at risk, they argue, of a new kind of tragedy of the commons—a tragedy not of enclosure but of underinvestment. The issue is not simply control of culture but its creation.

Instead of the defensive obsession with ownership, we should foster an ethos of stewardship: a steward preserves and protects, looking both forward and back, tending to what is not his.

Despite their passionate critiques of intellectual property and devotion to collaboration and “social production,” technology gurus never raise the possibility that the platforms through which we access and share culture should belong to people whose participation makes them valuable.

The concept of sustainable culture begins with envisioning a cultural ecology. New and old media are not separate provinces but part of a hybrid cultural ecosystem that includes the traditional and digital and composites of the two. Our virtual and physical lives are intertwined, inseparable, equally “real.” Whether their work is distributed by paper or pixels, creators never emerge fully formed from the ether.

Scale allows institutions to fight the kinds of legal battles investigative journalism requires or weather a string of losses until the odds finally deliver that blockbuster hit, an arrangement that looks grossly inefficient from one angle, or almost socialist from another.

Free culture advocates have it right that excessive copyright regulation can inhibit creativity, and the current copyright regime is in urgent need of reform. But “free” is not the answer: too many creative endeavors fail due to lack of investment;

A vision of sustainability acknowledges the damage incurred by the sole pursuit of wealth while trying to build an equitable system that can enable the production of socially valuable goods. The proliferation of crowdfunding Web sites, which allow people to back creative projects without expectation of financial return, are an encouraging development and a critical source of support to artists and tinkerers—yet they are no panacea.

a sustainability movement would harness new communications tools to shift the current conversation from free culture to fair culture.

Established fair trade principles, known to anyone who has purchased coffee with the telltale label, include transparency and accountability, payment of just prices, nondiscrimination and gender and racial equity, and respect for the environment. These principles speak to many of the

The shift to sustainable culture is possible, but implementing the necessary changes cannot fall to individuals and the marketplace alone. The solutions we need require collective, political action.

A laissez-faire system will inevitably underinvest in less profitable cultural works, no matter how worthy, enriching, or utterly vital they are. No matter how technically “disruptive” or “revolutionary,” a communications system left to the free market will not produce the independent, democratic culture we need.

This warning applies well beyond books to the majority of online platforms where we spend our time. They are “public” in a limited sense of the word: they are open spaces, but they are also private ones, where the rights Americans claim to hold dear—namely, protections for free speech and privacy—do not apply. When the CEO of Twitter tells users to “think of Twitter as a global town square,” he elides the fact that we don’t have to click “agree” on a Terms of Service, a binding contract, before entering an urban plaza.

Flickr is no such thing, just as Google is not operating a library. They are commercial enterprises designed to maximize revenue, not defend political expression, preserve our collective heritage, or facilitate creativity, and the people who work there are private employees, not public servants.7

While there might be many exciting, small experiments online, there are no large spaces dedicated to the public good. And while the Internet could have offered an alternative to the sphere of commodity exchange, private and often monopolistic markets now dominate; contrary to expectations, digital concentration set in more rapidly than with previous mediums. The revolutionary nature of technology was simply no match for the underlying economic imperatives,

Reform might begin with the phone, cable, and Internet providers who hook up our homes and mobile devices and have carved the United States into noncompetitive fiefdoms, enabling them to extract enormous rewards from what are essentially natural monopolies.

A more democratic culture means supporting creative work not because it is viral but because it is important, focusing on serving needs as well as desires, and making sure marginalized people are

A more open, egalitarian, participatory, and sustainable culture is profoundly worth championing, but technology alone cannot bring it into being. Left to race along its current course, the new order will come increasingly to resemble the old, and may end up worse in many ways. But the future has not been decided.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, government intervention is sometimes the only way to ensure competition. When left to their own devices, wired and wireless Internet service providers stifle innovation.

While some have suggested that crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter can replace government agencies to do much of this work, such a view is shortsighted. Crowdfunding allows individual creators to raise money from their contacts, which gives well-known and often well-resourced individuals a significant advantage. In contrast, a government agency must concern itself with the larger public good,

given not just a chance to speak but to be heard. A more democratic culture is one where previously excluded populations are given the material means to fully engage. To create a culture that is more diverse and inclusive, we have to pioneer ways of addressing discrimination and bias head-on, despite the difficulties of applying traditional methods of mitigating prejudice to digital networks.

Though it’s hard to believe now, newspapers were once the envy of the business world. Through the eighties and nineties, 20, 30, even 40 percent returns on investment were not uncommon, triple the norm for U.S. industry over the same period. Dollar signs in their eyes, chains devoured up local papers, consolidating and centralizing to maximize shareholder value, sometimes purchasing vibrant independent publications just to kill off competition. The overlords of monopoly journalism became increasingly disconnected from the communities they were supposed to serve. And when profits plateaued, they gutted themselves to maintain growth, trimming staff, reducing reporting budgets, and publishing fluff. Today, newspaper chiefs prefer to point fingers at new technology or distracted readers or even their own staff, but the erosion of standards and depth owes more to their long greedy binge than to the Internet or the rise of blogging or social media.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

One way to fight a profit-driven system that treats people as disposable is to instead treat people as redeemable. Solidarity means not writing anyone off completely, not throwing anyone away. It holds out hope that systems and individuals can change. it

Systems of supremacy and domination ultimately imperil even those who, in many crucial respects, benefit from them. Racism, while it elevates whiteness, is weaponized to erode the welfare and wages that would enable white people to lead healthier, less precarious lives. Misogyny hurts men economically and emotionally, as gendered pay gaps suppress overall wages and through the trap of destructive and often violent standards of masculinity. Transphobia impacts everyone by imposing state-sponsored gender norms and curtailing freedom and self-expression. Ableism, by devaluing and dehumanizing the disabled, dissuades people from demanding the social services and public assistance they need as they cope with illness or aging. The inequality and pursuit of endless growth that drive climate change endanger the homes, infrastructure, and supply chains on which the wealthy and working class both rely—not to mention the complex ecosystems in which we are all embedded. Solidarity, in other words, is not selfless. Siding with others is the only way to rescue ourselves from the catastrophes that will otherwise engulf us.

One way to fight a profit-driven system that treats people as disposable is to instead treat people as redeemable. Solidarity means not writing anyone off completely, not throwing anyone away. It holds out hope that systems and individuals can change.