In previous item I contrasted Hudson’s personal approach to GM’s anonymous bureaucracy. Hudson was a stock company but behaved more like a family-run outfit. Hudson’s founder Chapin continued running the company from 1909 until he died in 1936. Then Abraham Barit, who had been with the company from the founding, took over and continued until the merger in 1954. Engineer Baits did his own testing and suffered personally when his invention failed. He was also well paid and lived in Grosse Pointe.
Ted Gioia’s latest article is a hard-hitting indictment of the digital world, which has depersonalized WAY beyond GM’s bureaucracy. He compares Google, Facebook, Spotify et al to parasites like ticks. They drink the souls of creators and pay NOTHING in return.
In Nature when an obligate parasite kills its host it also dies, so most parasites avoid killing their hosts. This automatic feedback mechanism is gone when the parasite sucks billions of hosts at once. It’s free to destroy as many jobs and souls as possible, and then it simply switches to the AI that was trained on the souls.
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This is precisely the situation in the digital culture right now. Google’s success in leeching off newspapers puts newspapers out of business. Musicians earn less and less, even as Spotify makes more and more. Hollywood is collapsing because it can’t compete with free video made by content providers.
It’s no coincidence that these parasite platforms are the same companies investing heavily in AI. They must do this because even they understand that they are killing their hosts.
When the host dies, AI-generated content can replace human creativity. Or—to be blunt about—the host will die because of AI-generated content. And then the web billionaires won’t even need to toss those few shekels at artists.
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Polistra's Mill 