Club PA Newsletter #98 (Patreon)

Behold!  For what was promised has now come to pass: I…  well, I literally just did what I said I would.  Probably shouldn't preen too much.  Just a couple quick preens and I'm OUT.

I have a lot of thoughts about how advertising works online, having lived through several boom bust cycles as an active participant, all the way up to the current configuration - what a Destiny fan might call "The Final Shape," but industry observers and those who toil beneath its cruel lash call The Duopoly.  Facebook and Google essentially control it, along with the tools you use to access it, which has lead to some strange phenomena you might not be aware of.  Two interesting searches if you would like to be informed on this are first "Jedi Blue" and then "news media bargaining code australia" if you want to see what happens when a government recognizes this kind of market power and does something about it.  You can find a couple articles in the last few years talking about how there's some movement on that front, a lessening of the squeeze, but…  they're not talking about some fundamental shift, they're talking about Amazon.  I laughed when I read it.  It was a dry, crackling laugh, like a fire.

In the heyday, clickbait made its manufacturers tons of money.  But now that media outlets are all passing around the same worried bone, it's a necessity.  So when I read an article on Kotaku that is just, more or less, needling the reader and goading them into an angry response, my first instinct is to say "bro" and my second is to recognize at some level that they're simply engaging in the kind of rhetorical spasm these wicked algorithms reward.  It doesn't keep me from being angry about it, but I do remind myself that this is clearly bait and I shouldn't take it.  I'll take it here, with you, just because I have to suck the poison out.  I appreciate the opportunity.  Kotaku constitutes little more than a fob dangling from the keyring of venture capital.  Having been in that position, I lashed out also - but not at the reader.  I think I preferred the more colloquial Internet, which is to say, I'm old.

Yrs in perpetuity,

(CW)TB