Mark Stahlman (via RadioMail) on Tue, 11 Mar 97 17:29 MET |
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nettime: The Great Brain Drain |
Folks: As a follow up to my "What is New Media" post, let's focus for a minute on the economics of online discourse. As far as I can tell, the WELL is not a particularly successful commercial enterprise. At least it is not the sort of business which would attract aggressive investors and it is not likely to become a Wall Street darling nor will it make anyone particularly rich. It wasn't designed for that. Furthermore, America Online (which has made many people rich) has never really made a nickle in profits. The apparent "success" and reported profitability of AOL is largely a result of accounting practices which have allowed them to delay expenses and, therefore, report near-term profits while accumulating long-term liabilities on their balance sheet. Since I was the Wall Street analyst who brought AOL to the public market (the IPO was in March 1992 at $11.50 a share), I have looked fairly closely at their financials. The stock has done well because of the Internet craze and the lack of other "pure plays" rather than the profitability of the underlying business. In order to reverse the collapse of AOL stock (among other reasons), the company which was built on "hot-chat" (the dirty little secret hinted at all the way back to my IPO roadshow with the company), is now re-fashioning themselves to be a cable-TV network. They have hired Bob Pittman (originator of MTV and a gladiator show called "Morton Downey") to run AOL and they are about to announce a deal with Brandon Tartikoff (ex-NBC bigwig) to make AOL more TV-like. They are now talking about offering "premium" channels and "tiered" pricing -- just like U.S. cable companies. They know that they will *never* make money off two-way conversation -- although sex-talk is being considered as a lucrative option. RealAudio 3.0, anyone? This brings us to Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds. It is clearly an offshoot of the WELL (in uses the same Engaged WEB software) and it is populated by WELL-sians. They got $2+ million in venture money to launch and commitments from folks like technocrat John Gage of Sun Microsystems for continuing funding, so what gives? Why would another WELL get funding? Since what happens on eMinds is just the sort of conversation which is already proven to be a bad investment, what is it about their business model which is different from all the others. They intend to *sell* that conversation. That's right. They plan to package the converstation as books and other "spin-offs" as expensive cultural artifacts. According to my investigations into the financial community who are supporting eMinds, their business model is to sell the words that do *not* belong to those who post them. They have specifically trashed the "you own your own words" (YOYOW) ethic of their parent the WELL in order to attract investors and to be able to eventually cash out. If this sounds rather Faustian to you, then you are probably right. But, wait. It gets even better. According to my financial sources, they were asked the following question as they made the rounds to attract investors, "What if someone like Mark Stahlman shows up and takes over the conversation?" (No kidding, I was specifically cited according to those I've spoken to). The concern seemed to be two-fold. On the one hand, there were concerns that the conversation would not be "controllable" in the sense of what is discussed and how it progressed. Perhaps the "artifact" would be "polluted." And, moreover, what if the conversation began to revolve around someone (me or anyone) and that someone decided to leave taking the conversation with them? What would they have left to sell? What *are* the "barriers-to-entry" for talking when it revolves around personalities who can walk out the door? I began to notice some interesting behavior over at eMinds around the time that I was first starting to ask some background questions in private about how eMinds was funded. Howard Rheingold decided to freak-out in public with accusations that I was "paranoid." Hmmm . . . I thought, he just doesn't like me or my style. Then he did it again and he suggested that there was no reason why anyone had to talk to me at eMinds -- and he has not recognised my presense ever since. Then one of Howard's henchmen, Bob Rossney, started to send me private emails asking me to leave his area ("Technos") or to shutup. Hmmm . . . maybe he's taking his lead from Howard and trying to discredit me publically. Then, he too freaked out (this time on the WELL) and launched into a campaign to discredit everything that I'll been saying. I was mostly asking questions rather than telling people what to think, BTW, so he attacked me for not supplying any answers. Then he and another colleague of his started in with the "filter" campaign. The current approach has been to advise people to just ignore me. And, Rossney will not post to those topics which I'm active in apparently in the hopes that they will die out. Hmmm . . . could there be any connection back to the business model here? Is this just personal or is it really business? Could it have anything to do with my request for the royalties for my posts if they are ever sold? Yes, as all of you around nettime know, I am deliberately provocative inthis part of my life. I have decided that this is the best use of this medium at this time. I have also read enough of the literature of Esalen-style "hot-tub" group-process (the "theory" behind eMinds and the WELL) to know that the only thing which a classic "leaderless group" can't tolerate is someone who understands how these groups work. It is the "meta-" level commentary which is really disturbing because it disrupts the illusion that everyone is swimmning/pissing in the same tepid soup. Social psychologists understand this and that is presumably why the resident soc/psych at the WELL, Donna Hoffman (Vanderbuilt now but trained at Duke), advised them to not invite me into the "goofy leftists" hot-tub. Will (or have) others emerge(d) who are judged to be disruptive to the process of stealing people's words and re-packaging them for sale? What does all this mean for the eventual success of eMinds' Faustian business model? We shall see, won't we? We shall see. It's all an experiment and, so far, I'm having a great time playing with the dials on the instruments. I encourage all of you to enjoy yourselves as well. It's not that I'm asking for any concerted effort or anything. I prefer to act alone without any protective close air-support. But, since we are all guinea pigs in this rather open-ended social experiment, it might be fun to put on a lab coat every once in a while and to pretend that you are the doctor and not the patient. My motto is your brain is your own (YBIYO), BTW. Don't let anyone drain yours without a fight. Oh, yes. I expressly forbid Bruce Sterling or anyone else x-posting this note to the WELL or to eMinds or to any related system. I FORBID it so don't do it! If there is to be any real discussion of the implications of stealing people's words as payment in some devils' bargain then it should, by all rights, happen in demon-free territory. Thanks. Mark Stahlman New Media Associates New York City newmedia@mcimail.com -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de