Astra Taylor Quotes

Advertisers are happy to see the stuff they've branded out there for free, they don't care about scarcity, they want any message they're invested in to be shared and to be abundant and to be passed along.

Look back on the utopian dreams of the previous century, or even the century before that, where people thought machines would ultimately give us a quality of life where our needs would be taken care of so we could all basically be artists together in the evening, after we had fished, hunted, raised cattle - or whatever it was Marx imagined for us.

For example, instead of being asked to write an article, suddenly editors wanted me to make super-short videos. The assumptions of those video gigs was that kids don't read as much news and basically need to be read to, which I found really problematic and kind of insulting. I thought, Isn't it just that you don't have any money and that's why you want me to make some crappy "content" for your website?

All this stuff - about the materiality of the network, what it's made of, and how it works - should be part of a basic media literacy, because we depend on this technology for more and more aspects of our day-to-day lives.

We haven't developed a progressive vocabulary. We say something is "public," but we just mean it's viewable online. Or we say it's "open," but we just mean it's accessible. I would like for us to think about terms critically and maybe change our vocabulary a bit. What if pubic actually meant publicly-funded, or social meant socialized.

To go from the vision that we would all be free to express ourselves creatively because our material needs were being met, to this reality where nobody has money, people are unemployed, and the machines are harnessed by the lucky guys who Facebook or Google and we're supposed to be happy just to contribute content to their site.

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

There was all this enthusiasm about amateurism and the idea that people could now just make videos in their bedroom, or blog news stories and share it online, and isn't this great? Now we can do it just for the love of it and not try to be professionals, corrupted by careerism.

One of the big myths about people growing up is that they are "digital natives;" that just because they've been raised with the Internet - that you're very adept at using the app on your phone - it doesn't mean you have any idea about how the Internet actually works.

Basically political economy - that you have to look at how funding structures shape the media landscape. You have to look at commercial interests, consolidation - the economy structures are experience.

It's not just that we all as individuals should reevaluate our relationship with our devices - maybe you should, on a personal level - but in terms of balancing the micro and the macro and the personal and the structural, it's actually a bigger issue than you and your phone addiction.

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

I think somebody who is more self-reflective should ask why they personally aren't going on that path. If amateurism is so great, why didn't you stay one? You have to look at the larger economy, a backdrop of unemployment; it's shitty out there.

Whether it's a professional, academic keeping people out by using certain mystifying language, or technologists presenting their work as incredibly complicated, no one can understand it (especially not "moms," who are always invoked as the ultimate know-nothings, which is incredibly insulting to a whole lot of people).

I work for free all the time, as a writer but also as an activist. The decisions we have to make as individuals are really fraught but also can be really wonderful and we're all navigating this reality to the best of our abilities. But, again, I wanted to take a step back and look at the broader context.

I'm interested in the way the whole cultural landscape can shift over time. Okay, this will seem like a silly example, but look at the whole discourse around "selling out," a concept people say is irrelevant because there's no more distinction between mainstream and underground, inside and outside (which I don't really believe, but that's another issue).

Again, it does seem like frustration is mounting in interesting ways, but I'm not sure there will be some dramatic tipping point. Then again, looking back on the history of television, you never know. People had to fight and articulate the politics and the rationale for different funding mechanisms. That was a long and drawn-out battle fought in different countries; it's not like BBC and the CBC in Canada just magically appeared out of the ether. People had to organize for it. I'm always willing to be surprised.

I was shocked when I tried to articulate this to someone who had posted the film and asked them to remove it for a few months, and I actually told them that after that they could put it back up and they were just completely unwilling to compromise - you'd think I was Rupert Murdoch or something.

And of course the things that get the most attention online tend to be similar to those that succeeded under the old model.

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

One connection I see between the work I did on philosophy and my work on technology is that both communities tend to mystify and create an atmosphere of complexity.

Not to be to be a vulgar materialist or be too reductive, but all of that was completely absent from the conversation. Instead we were told it was a "revolutionary" moment, where these new tools would inevitably displace the old media dinosaur and that things would be democratized and wasn't it great we could all collaborate on these platforms.

I try to look at the evolution of these utopian claims. In the late '60s there was an assumption that the wealth generated by industry would be taxed and then put into social programs and it would provide a baseline of stability that would allow people to have the time for self-expression; and that social contract has eroded over the last four decades and now it's every person for themselves.

There's also the issue of tech titans throwing their weight around in Washington and lobbying. There was just a Reuters poll that reported that more than half of Americans are concerned that tech companies are "encroaching too much on their lives." That's pretty major, considering these companies were universally loved not that long ago.

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.

Also, after Examined Life was finished I found myself thinking about the way creative opportunities and distribution channels were shifting. Should I be showing my films in theaters or just think about getting them out online? There were other issues, too.

One thing that's important to point out is that this kind of populism has a long and mixed history. It's part of this tradition of problematic anti-elitism where the elites are always the liberal class - the intellectuals, the professors, the artists - and not the economic elites. Why are we so mad and aggrieved at newspaper editors but not at corporate executives? I think we need to look more at the latter, at economic elites.

One thing I point out is, a lot of people tooting the horn of amateurism, actually, these people were professionals. Some are professors who are employed full time. Others are marketers or business consultants.

Early on, America took one path and went down the advertising road, and in the UK they founded the BBC and developed a different kind of public broadcasting. There was a point where TV was so beholden to commercial interest that people - civil society - actually rose up and said, "This is ridiculous: we have our soap-selling soap operas, cigarette-sponsored news broadcast; we have our rigged quiz shows - let's put some checks and balances here."

One consequence of this is that people are expected to make it on their own by chasing clicks or building a brand. What a diminished vision that is.

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.

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:

I feel like we're stuck in the former mode of reacting because that's what gains traction in Washington. But I really believe we need a robust public good argument. Net neutrality is not just about creating the next Instagram or Farmville or whatever.

There's something odd about telling people, artists, that they need to work for free to be pure while you're sitting there getting a salary that ultimately is paid by a generation of young people going deeply into debt for their education.

Technology and television didn't dictate one path or the other - it was civil society and public policy intervening in creating alternative funding models. So I think that's one of the questions for our time: do we want to intervene in this model or completely acquiesce and leave it to the unfettered, not-actually-that-free market? Neither path is inevitable.

Think there's a culture of Silicon Valley that seems to have the attitude that you can have it both ways, that you can be an insurgent but also, ultimately, it's paid for by advertising, when in fact advertising is totally retrograde. Now that's an industry we should be disrupting, and maybe you disrupt it by funding public media. None of this is technological destiny; there are only social choices.

What we need to do is take that inchoate sense that something isn't right and give it a structural component and the sense that things can be another way.

One sad consequence of this is that people don't feel permitted to try understand Internet infrastructure, so I'm really grateful to groups like Free Press and other nonprofits who are trying to make the issue urgent and comprehensible. And Andre Blum's book Tubes is great on this topic.

A big factor is that the enthusiast camp's values are really rooted in Silicon Valley and in these supposedly new business models. But again, I think this such an interesting moment because things like the NSA revelations are really forcing people to recognize the connections between corporate and government surveillance.

As a citizen I might be well-behaved and have nothing salacious or radical about me, I might be a total bore, but I might suffer somehow if other people are being spied on and blocked from doing important work that might have a collective benefit down the road. The personal doesn't necessarily translate to the social.

There's this divergence out there between the very small and the very large with the middle disappearing. There is something paradoxical going on where there is this access and we can seek out things on the fringes, but that doesn't describe the overall reality, because the big are bigger than ever.

We've been criticizing these superficial aspects, like whether we are all more distracted. We really need to articulate a defense, a critique, that merges awareness of the technology with a more traditional, progressive, left-wing critique of the market.