This past week, in a small niche of the greater culture, a corporate media outlet got shut down.
This is because a competing corporate media conglomerate bought the outlet's parent company and shut them down. To ordinary business observors, this is nothing unusual; this is typical acquisition and consolidation operations.
As much as one can assign nefarious intent--and yes, there is such--for this the act itself needed no such thing.
I say that because media as a commercial enterprise is entirely driven by Network Effects for their value. Competing networks always end up with the greater subsuming the lesser without outside intervention purely due to how commercial incentives work. Centralization is rewarded, so that is what happens over time.
Revealed Preferences shows that this stablizes at a handful of choices for the end-user with noticable, but not necessarily substantial, differences between them. This means that the end result is a Cartel arrangement where conflict is managed, even manufactured, to gatekeep out upstarts and maintain the illusion of choice between the Cartel members.
It takes real power from outside to prevent this from happening, but the irony is that only centralization allows for real power to accrue into a dense enough form to do that.
Figuring out how solve this problem, or at least come up with a practical solution, is something better minds than mine have grappled with for generations.
I may have something that works where I am, but it isn't likely to be universally applicable. Keep that in mind if you grapple with this problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment