© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
As you may have noticed, I am posting very little new content to the blog.
The main reason why I am reducing my presence on the blog is contained in Ted Gioia’s “The Honest Broker”August 19, 2024 Substack feature entitled 10 Reasons Why Technological Progress Is Now Reversing Or How Silicon Valley Started Breaking Bad. The link will redirect you to his page where Ted elaborates on this question:
“Until recently, most of us welcomed innovation, but something changed. And now a huge number of people are anxious and fearful about the same tech companies they once trusted.
What caused this shift?”
Ted concludes:
“… we still have considerable power as individuals. That’s the weakness in the technocracy.
Every one of those tech abuses requires users — there’s a reason why those words have a similar etymology. In the final analysis, these digital empires only exist with our willing participation.
And if you are a ‘content creator’ (ugh!), you have even greater power to disrupt the system. All the big web platforms rely on the willing contributions of individuals. Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and all the rest still require humans like us.
These platforms are just intermediaries. They require us at both ends of the business system—as creators and consumers. Without us, their entire economic model collapses.
The people running these empires understand this vulnerability. That’s why they are working so hard to replace human creativity with AI imitations. They know that their platforms die without our support, and want to find a way to reduce this dependency.
That’s why I’ve chosen to operate on an independent publishing platform [Substack] that rewards writers and artists—and makes sure that almost 90% of cash goes to human creators. There are no advertisers. There’s no outside interest standing between me and the reader.
It feels like a community. Maybe you’ve noticed that too.
This is the healthy alternative to the rot. And Substack is hardly the only renegade bucking the system—other healthy, culture-building organizations and platforms are out there. They deserve our support.
Every time one of us switches from a dominant centralized platform to one of these alternative grassroots communities, the culture heals in a meaningful way.
For the time being, each of us has a responsibility to put our own values into practice. Don’t underestimate the cumulative power this represents.”
The consequence of this shift for me is that I can no longer freely give away the content that I generate for the benefit of Google, the owners of the blogging platform that I use for JazzProfiles.
Over the past 14 years, I have contributed almost 4,000 posts to the Google-owned Blogger platform and most of these still reside in the archives.
It takes a great deal of time and resources to generate this much content and for many years I have subsidized these expenses and provided these blog postings as “gifts to my friends.”
Between now and the end of the year, I will be gradually moving the JazzProfiles archives as well as posting new features to my Substack platform which you can access at cerra.substack.com.
A paid subscription on Cerra.Substack.Com is only $5.00 per month. Many of you pay that for a hamburger or a veggie wrap at lunch.
These days, one copy of The New York Times costs $3.00, $4.00 on Sunday; The Wall Street Journal daily rate is $5.00 and USA Today is $4.95 for a single issue. And you can forget about the cost of a monthly magazine, especially one with color photos in it.
On Substack, I will be providing a minimum of 3 features per week; 12 monthly for the same cost as one issue of most daily papers or. If you prefer, one burger.
I hope you understand the circumstances for this transition away from the JazzProfiles blog.
I’ll look forward to you joining me as a contributing sponsor on our new journey.
And if you need more reasons, here’s another excerpt from Ted’s September 17th article entitled “Are We Now Living in a Parasite Culture? In the new economy, you get consumed.”
Just take a look at the dominant digital platforms—and consider how little they actually create. But the amount of leeching they do is really quite stunning, especially when compared with the dominant businesses of the past.
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What does Facebook really create? Almost nothing. It relies on 3 billion users to create content (ugh!—their word, not mine), and then monetizes these people and their unpaid labor.
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What does Google really create? Almost nothing. Just look at how it destroys newspapers, while doing zero journalism itself. The comparison with a parasite could hardly be more apt. It feeds off the news, but never adds to it.
Then look at every one of Alphabet’s other business units, and ask the same question. What’s getting created here by the company itself? Very little—but this enormous business is a genuine innovator in parasitical software and business models, leeching off others so successfully, that it now has a market capitalization of $2 trillion. -
What does Spotify really create? Almost nothing. One person—a single individual—recently redesigned the Spotify user interface from scratch, and came up with something better. But the folks at Spotify don’t worry about their lousy app, because they’re so busy sucking blood from the creative economy, to which they contribute not one whit. Meanwhile, their CEO is now richer than any musician in the history of the world.
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What does TikTok really create? Almost nothing. This company relies on one million creators—none of them are employees. Most of them are working for hopes and dreams. TikTok is run like a Hollywood studio, but without cast, crew, directors, scriptwriters, or any creative talent whatsoever. But that hardly matters when you’re just a parasite living off unwitting hosts.