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1. Embed this notice
   Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:40:27 JST Cory Doctorow

   This is my last Pluralistic post of the year, and rather than round up my most successful posts of the year, I figured I'd write a little about why it's impossible for me to do that, and why that is by design, and what that says about the arts, monoopolies, AI, and creative labor markets.

   --

   If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

   https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/21/blockheads-r-us/#vocational-awe

   1/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:41:29 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     I started Pluralistic nearly five years ago, and from the outset, I was adamant that I wouldn't measure my success through quantitative measures. The canonical version of Pluralistic - the one that lives at pluralistic.net - has *no* metrics, no analytics, no logs, and no tracking. I don't know who visits the site. I don't know how many people visit the site. I don't know which posts are most popular, and which ones are the least popular. I *can't* know any of that.
     x
     2/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:41:40 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     I started Pluralistic nearly five years ago, and from the outset, I was adamant that I wouldn't measure my success through quantitative measures. The canonical version of Pluralistic - the one that lives at pluralistic.net - has *no* metrics, no analytics, no logs, and no tracking. I don't know who visits the site. I don't know how many people visit the site. I don't know which posts are most popular, and which ones are the least popular. I *can't* know any of that.

     3/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:41:48 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The other versions of Pluralistic are less ascetic, but only because there's no way for me to turn off *some* metrics on those channels. The Mailman service that delivers the (tracker-free) email version of Pluralistic necessarily has a system for telling me how many subscribers I have, but I have *never* looked at that number, and have no intention of doing so. I have turned off notifications when someone signs up for the list, or resigns from it.

     4/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:41:59 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The commercial, surveillance-heavy channels for Pluralistic - Tumblr, Twitter - have a lot of metrics, but again, I don't consult them. Medium and Mastodon have some metrics, and again, I just pretend they don't exist.

     What *do* I pay attention to? The qualitative impacts of my writing. Comments. Replies. Emails. Other bloggers who discuss it, or discussions on Metafilter, Slashdot, Reddit and Hacker News.

     5/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:42:06 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     That stuff matters to me a *lot* because I write for two reasons, which are, in order: to work out my own thinking, and; to influence other peoples' thinking.

     Writing is a cognitive prosthesis for me. Working things out on the page helps me work things out in my life. And, of course, working things out on the page helps me work *more* things out on the page. Writing begets writing:

     https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:42:22 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Honestly, that is sufficient. Not in the sense that writing, without being read, would make me happy or fulfilled. Being read and being part of a community and a conversation matters *a lot* to me. But the *very act* of writing is so important to me that even if no one read me, I would still write.

     7/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:42:47 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This is a thing that writers aren't supposed to admit. As I wrote on this blog's fourth anniversary, the most laughably false statement about writing ever uttered is Samuel Johnson's notorious "No man but a blockhead ever wrote but for money":

     https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#synthesis

     Making art is not an "economically rational" activity. Neither is attempting to persuade other people to your point of view.

     8/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:43:00 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     These activities are not merely *intrinsically satisfying*, they are also *necessary*, at least for many of us. The long, stupid fight about copyright that started in the Napster era has rarely acknowledged this, nor has it grappled with the implications of it. On the one hand, you have copyright maximalists who say totally absurd things like, "If you don't pay for art, no one will make art, and art will disappear."

     9/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:43:12 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This is one of those radioactively false statements whose falsity is so glaring that it can be seen from orbit.

     But on the other hand, you know who knows this fact *very* well? The corporations that pay creative workers. Movie studios, record labels, publishers, games studios: they all know that they are in possession of a workforce that *has* to make art, and will continue to do so, paycheck or not, until someone pokes their eyes out or breaks their fingers.

     10/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:43:20 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     People make art because it *matters* to them, and this trait makes workers terribly exploitable. As Fobazi Ettarh writes in her seminal paper on "vocational awe," workers who care about their jobs are at a huge disadvantage in labor markets. Teachers, librarians, nurses, and yes, *artists*, are all motivated by a sense of mission that often trumps their own self-interest and well-being and their bosses know it:

     https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:43:28 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     One of the most important ideas in David Graeber's magisterial book *Bullshit Jobs* is that the ground state of labor is to do a job that you are proud of and that matters to you, but late-stage capitalist alienation has gotten so grotesque that some people will actually sneer at the idea that, say, teachers should be well compensated: "Why should you get a living wage - isn't the satisfaction of helping children payment enough?"

     https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/20/david-graebers-bullshit-jobs-why-does-the-economy-sustain-jobs-that-no-one-values/

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:43:39 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     These are the most salient facts of the copyright fight: creativity is a non-economic activity, and this makes creative workers extremely vulnerable to exploitation. People make art because they *have to*. As Marx was finishing *Kapital*, he was often stuck working from home, having *pawned his trousers* so he could keep writing. The fact that artists don't respond rationally to economic incentives doesn't mean they should starve to death.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:43:48 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Art - like nursing, teaching and librarianship - is necessary for human thriving.

     No, the implication of the economic irrationality of vocational awe is this: *the only tool that can secure economic justice for workers who truly can't help but do their jobs is solidarity.* Creative workers need to be in solidarity with one another, and with our audiences - and, often, with the other workers at the corporations who bring our work to market.

     14/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:44:02 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     We are all class allies locked in struggle with the owners of both the entertainment companies and the technology companies that sit between us and our audiences (this is the thesis of Rebecca Giblin's and my 2022 book *Chokepoint Capitalism*):

     https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:44:10 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The idea of artistic solidarity is an old and important one. Victor Hugo, creator of the first copyright treaty - the Berne Convention - wrote movingly about how the point of securing rights for creators wasn't to allow their biological children to exploit their work after their death, but rather, to ensure that the *creative* successors of artists could build on their forebears' accomplishments.

     16/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:44:20 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Hugo - like any other artist who has a shred of honesty and has thought about the subject for more than ten seconds - knew that he was part of a creative community and tradition, one composed of readers and writers and critics and publishing workers, and that this was a community and a tradition worth fighting for and protecting.

     17/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:44:26 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     One of the most important and memorable interviews Rebecca and I did for our book was with Liz Pelly, one of the sharpest critics of Spotify (our chapter about how Spotify steals from musicians is the only part of the audiobook available on Spotify itself - a "Spotify Exclusive"!):

     https://open.spotify.com/show/7oLW9ANweI01CVbZUyH4Xg

     Pelly has just published a major, important new book about Spotify's ripoffs, called *Mood Machine*:

     https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Mood-Machine/Liz-Pelly/9781668083505

     18/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:44:43 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     A long article in *Harper's* unpacks one of the core mechanics at the heart of Spotify's systematic theft from creative workers: the use of "ghost artists," whose generic music is cheaper than real music, which is why Spotify crams it into their playlists:

     https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:44:54 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The subject of Ghost Artists has long been shrouded in mystery and ardent - but highly selective - denials from Spotify itself. In her article - which features leaked internal chats from Spotify - Pelly gets to the heart of the matter. Ghost artists are musicians who are recruited by shadowy companies that offer flat fees for composing and performing inoffensive muzak that can fade into the background.

     20/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:45:07 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This is wholesaled to Spotify, which crams it into wildly popular playlists of music that people put on while they're doing something else ("Deep Focus," "100% Lounge," "Bossa Nova Dinner," "Cocktail Jazz," "Deep Sleep," "Morning Stretch") and might therefore settle for an inferior product.

     21/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:45:19 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Spotify calls this "Perfect Fit Music" and it's the pink slime of music, an extruded, musiclike content that plugs a music-shaped hole in your life, without performing the communicative and aesthetic job that real music exists for.

     22/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:45:29 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     After many dead-end leads with people involved in the musical pink slime industry, Pelly finally locates a musician who's willing to speak anonymously about his work (he asks for anonymity because he relies on the pittances he receives for making pink slime to survive). This jazz musician knows very little about where the music he's commissioned to produce ends up, which is by design.

     23/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:45:42 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The musical pink slime industry, like all sleaze industries, is shrouded in the secrecy sought by bosses who know that they're running a racket they should be ashamed of.

     The anonymous musician composes a stack of compositions on his couch, then goes into a studio for a series of one-take recordings. There's usually a rep from the PFC pink slime industry there, and the rep's feedback is always "play simpler."

     24/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:45:56 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     As the anonymous musician explains:

     > That’s definitely the thing: nothing that could be even remotely challenging or offensive, really. The goal, for sure, is to be as milquetoast as possible.

     This source calls the arrangement "shameful." Another musician Pelly spoke to said "it felt unethical, like some kind of money-laundering scheme."

     25/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:46:21 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The PFC firms say these performers are just making music, the way anyone might, and releasing it under pseudonyms in a way that "has been popular across mediums for decades." But Pelly's interview subjects told her that they don't consider their work to be art:

     > It feels like someone is giving you a prompt or a question, and you’re just answering it, whether it’s actually your conviction or not. Nobody I know would ever go into the studio and record music this way.

     26/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:46:34 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Artists who are recruited to make new pink slime are given reference links to exiting pink slime and ordered to replicate it as closely as possible. The tracks produced this way that do the best are then fed to the next group of musicians to replicate, and so on.

     27/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:46:49 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     It's the musical equivalent of feeding slaughterhouse sweepings to the next generation of livestock, a version of the gag from *Catch 22* where a patient in a body-cast has a catheter bag and an IV drip, and once a day a nurse comes and swaps them around.

     Pelly reminds us that Spotify was supposed to be an answer to the painful question of the Napster era: how do we pay musicians for their labor?

     28/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:47:00 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Spotify was sold as a way to bypass the "gatekeepers": the big three labels who own 70% of all recorded music, whose financial maltreatment of artists was seen as moral justification for file sharing ("Why buy the CD if the musician won't see any of the money from it?").

     29/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:47:07 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     But the way that Spotify secured rights to all the popular music in the world was by handing over big equity stakes in its business to the Big Three labels, and giving them wildly preferential terms that made it impossible for independent musicians and labels to earn more than homeopathic fractions of a penny for each stream, even as Spotify became the one essential conduit for reaching an audience:

     https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#excessive-buyer-power

     30/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:47:15 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     It turns out that getting fans to pay for music has *no necessary connection* to getting musicians paid. Vocational awe means that the fact that someone has induced a musician to make music doesn't mean that the musician is getting a fair share of what you pay for music. The same goes for every kind of art, and every field where vocational awe plays a role, from nursing to librarianship.

     31/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:47:24 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     *Chokepoint Capitalism* tries very hard to grapple with this conundrum; the second half of the book is a series of detailed, shovel-ready policy prescriptions for labor, contract, and copyright reforms that will immediately and profoundly shift the share of income generated by creative labor from bosses to workers.

     32/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:47:34 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Which brings me back to this little publishing enterprise of mine, and the fact that I do it for free, and not only that, give it away under a Creative Commons Attribution license that allows you to share and republish it, for money, if you choose:

     https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

     33/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:47:46 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     I am lucky enough that I make a good living from my writing, but I'm also honest enough with myself to know just how much luck was involved with that fact, and insecure enough to live in a state of constant near-terror about what happens when my luck runs out.

     34/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:47:54 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     I came up in science fiction, and I vividly remember the writers I admired whose careers popped like soap-bubbles when Reagan deregulated the retail sector, precipitating a collapse in the grocery stores and pharmacies where "midlist" mass-market paperbacks were sold by the millions across the country:

     https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

     35/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:48:01 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     These writers - the ones who are still alive - are living proof of the fact that you have to break our fingers to get us to stop writing. Some of them haven't had a mainstream publisher in *decades*, but they're *still* writing, and self-publishing, or publishing with small presses, and often they're doing the best work of their careers, and almost no one is seeing it, and they're *still* doing it.

     36/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:48:13 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Because we aren't engaged in economically rational activity. We're doing something essential - essential to us, first and foremost, and essential to the audiences and peers our work reaches and changes and challenges.

     37/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:48:21 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Pluralistic is, in part, a way for me too face the fear I wake up with every day, that some day, my luck will run out, as it has for nearly all the writers I've ever admired, and to reassure myself that the writing will go on doing what I need it to do for my psyche and my heart even if - when - my career regresses to the mean.

     38/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:48:31 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     It's a way for me to reaffirm the solidaristic nature of artistic activity, the connection with other writers and other readers (because I am, of course, an avid, constant reader). Commercial fortunes change. Monopolies lay waste to whole sectors and swallow up the livelihoods of people who believe in what they do like a whale straining tons of plankton through its baleen. But solidarity endures. Solidarietatis longa, vita brevis.

     Happy New Year folks. See you in 2026.

     eof/

   • Embed this notice
     lispwizard (lispwizard@techhub.social)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:56:14 JST lispwizard

     in reply to

     @pluralistic 2026?

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 07:56:14 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     • lispwizard

     @lispwizard I don't know what you are asking.

   • Embed this notice
     David (defractal@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 08:13:45 JST David

     in reply to

     @pluralistic Great piece, as ever. If I could suggest one trivial edit:
     s/exiting/existing/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 08:13:45 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     • David

     @deFractal Thanks!

   • Embed this notice
     Brokar (brokar@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 09:07:58 JST Brokar

     in reply to

     @pluralistic Sir, you're a spammer! 39? Really?

     But damn, i like your articles! So don't stop.

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 09:07:58 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     • Brokar

     @Brokar Here's how to read threads on Masto:

     https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 09:14:19 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     • lispwizard

     @lispwizard A typo - It's fixed already!

   • Embed this notice
     lispwizard (lispwizard@techhub.social)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 09:14:20 JST lispwizard

     in reply to

     @pluralistic You said "see you in 2026" at the end of your thread (and blog article), are you really going to skip 2025?

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 10:02:23 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     • elala@nrw.social

     @elala Thanks!

   • Embed this notice
     elala@nrw.social (elala@nrw.social)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 10:02:24 JST elala@nrw.social

     in reply to

     @pluralistic
     I also wish you a happy new year.🙂

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 10:35:31 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     • elala@nrw.social

     @elala You too!

   • Embed this notice
     Frank Engelhard (frank_engelhard@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 22:15:36 JST Frank Engelhard

     in reply to

     @pluralistic "I can only know what I think after I see what I write."