Latest Project Censored Radio Show Features Interview With CDL Co-Founder Michael D. D. White On Dismantlement of Libraries- (And Another Interview With Investigative Reporter Dave Lindorff)

Here’s something we don’t think you’ll want to pass by–   The latest Project Censored Radio Show Features Interview With CDL Co-Found Michael D. D. White (And Another With Investigative Reporter Dave Lindorff).  See:

Latest Project Censored Show:- Dave Lindorff and Michael D. D. White, May 21, 2019

The weekly Project Censored Radio Show, just part of the work Project Censored produces (also including an annual book and annual identification of top-censored stories), is a Pacifica network public radio show, a quintessential Pacifica network show fulfilling the mission of Pacifica by pointing out on a weekly basis the huge doughnut hole of major news and issues that are going unreported by corporate media.  Paying attention to how and why such information is being buried and ignored usually makes clear the other hugely important part of the picture: The power structures in place that would such matters steered in certain ways and therefore have a vested interest in an uninformed, misinformed or misled public.

The half hour interview with Michael D. D. White covers a lot of ground.  It is probably at this moment the best up-to-date half hour to get an overview hearing about why New York City libraries (and potentially other libraries similarly around the country and the world) are being attacked and shifted away from pursuit of their traditional functions.

The following are links you may want to us to delve deeper into some of things you’ll hear discussed in the interview:

Main Citizens Defending Libraries page

Of course, our our current main Citizens Defending Libraries page, which, with lots of links, takes you in any direction you would like to research more about the dismantling of NYC libraries.  In all, it provides a very good overview, fairly parallel to the interview, but with even more information, of what we are up against broken down by topics.

It's Not Just The Real Estate Industry Threatening Libraries: Examining The Panoply of Other Threats

Our CDL page on Digital vs. Physical books:  Physical Books vs. Digital Books.

Articles About Library Privacy and Surveillance In Libraries

Interesting to Think That it All Began With BOOKS? Except That Amazon and World’s Wealthiest Man (As We Know Jeff Bezos Today) Didn’t Exactly Begin That Way. . .

Amazon Headquarters Lands In Long Island City: What Happens When Our Elected Officials Hand The Task of Governing Over To A Private Sector Corporation

Citizens Defending Libraries has covered suppressed books, including here:
Books As Catalysts In A World Where Information And Points of View Are Often Suppressed

Biography of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, one example of a suppressed book.

As for Pacifica stations getting more content out and the possibility of HD radio (and you can think about the parallels between why it's important to preserve traditional libraries and why terrestrial radio is similarly important, there's a bit written about HD radio here:

Feeling Constrained By Your Digital `Liberation’? Speaking Personally, I Am

Interestingly, what that article mentions about our doorbells no longer being zones of privacy became a NY Times op-ed subject (Time To Panic About Privacy) in the special Sunday Review privacy project (but the way the Times has it set up on line is creepy and may turn your brain off).

Michael White reported a little bit of Esprit de l'escalier (spirit of the staircase) after his Project censored interview-  He said that when co-host Chase Palmieri asked about implication of Amazon Prime's reach (and he couldn't answer that exactly), he should have one-upped the conversation respecting such concerns with a jump to mentioning Alexa.  And when it comes to Alexa, our YouTube channel has a short Alexa video that's funny in a creepy, black humor sort of way.  See:

We think you will enjoy this video: Alexa Explains Surveillance Valley (+ Siri on Alexa)

The video:
Alexa Explains Surveillance Valley (+ Siri on Alexa)

The Alexa video is also embedded in a CDL post about Yasha Levine's book (Levine could be a good Project Censored guest):

Reading on the Internet vs. Reading a Book You Picked Up Browsing In Your Library: Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet”

There is another immediate followup Citizens Defending Libraries post to the above Yasha Levine book post (below), but the implications of it are very layered, nuanced and frightening, offering an uncomfortably challenging perspective.  It would have been, a real "rabbit hole," to get into-- It's basically another angle on where Levine gets around to for the end of his book.  Levin was even interviewed about it on WNYC's "On The Media":

Self Proclaimed As Fighting Surveillance, Library Freedom Project Is Tied to Tor Service With Its Deep Ongoing Connections, Including Financing, To The U.S. Government

The article mentioned by Michael White at the end about the interview about the non-representation of super-majorities of the public on major issue after major issue  (including not giving us the libraries we can afford):

Everybody’s Realizing It Now: The Political Establishment Is Not Willing To Give The Public The Things The Vast Majority Of Americans Want And That We Could Easily Have

Signing our petition lets people get email updates.

Noticing New York’s Seasonal Reflection Thinks About Libraries, Amazon, A Departed Library Defender and Has Pictures of The Luxury Tower Replacing What Was Brooklyn’s Second Biggest Library.

Partially complete luxury tower overlooking the Unitarian church where you can hear a sermon about Amazon and from the DUMBO waterfront. 

In recent years, the threat to New York City libraries has regularly been part of Noticing New York’s annual season reflection.  This year it’s true again, including a mention of the passing of library defender Justine Swartz, plus there are pictures of the 2/3rds complete luxury tower replacing what was Brooklyn’s second biggest library, the Business, Career and Education Brooklyn Heights Library, the central destination federal depository library that served downtown.  . .  The luxury building, insisting its presence will be felt, will certainly be tall enough to be seen from all sorts of vantages in the neighborhood and those adjacent.

And there are thoughts about (shivering book lovers!) Amazon’s heavily subsidized expansion into Queens, which Noticing New York covered in a recent article.

The article (with links to past year’s season reflections as well) is here:

This Year’s Annual Seasonal Reflection: It Rhymes (But Not With "Reason" or "Season")

Sermonizing In Brooklyn Heights About Amazon (you know That “book seller”), Technology and Consumerism

Ana Levy-Lyons delivering her sermon on Amazon on November 11, 2018 at First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn

In New York City everybody is talking about Amazon now because of the plans unveiled to locate Amazon offices (with the piling on of huge public subsidies to the already wealthy) in Queens, New York, Long Island City.

Maybe people should also be talking about Amazon because it is the Christmas season and Amazon is raking it in.

November 11th there was a sermon at the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn.  It was in Brooklyn Heights, just around the corner and only a stone’s throw from the location of the second biggest library in Brooklyn, the central destination Business, Career and Education library that was sold off to build a luxury tower. The sermon by Minister Ana Levy-Lyons was about what it means for Amazon to be taking over.  You can find the full text of the sermon as well as listen to it here- Sermon: Technology & Religion: God As Consumer, November 11, 2018.

If you were there listening to the sermon you would have recognized in it some of the themes we have been writing about in Citizens Defending Libraries. In some respects the most up-to-date coverage of concerns about Amazon surfaced here in connection with books and the libraries has to do with the control of information: Amazon’s collection of information about all of its customers; questions about how it accelerated into total dominance of the market so fast while starting with the sale of books—  Nearly half of all books, both print and digital, are now sold by Amazon. . . . 

That statistic does not bode well for ensuring free speech or unfettered public discourse.  That concern amplifies especially when one considers how Amazon, including its ties to the internet, has significant roots in the defense and surveillance industry.  National Notice updated a Citizens Defending Libraries post publishing an article that addresses this: Interesting to Think That it All Began With BOOKS? Except That Amazon and World’s Wealthiest Man (As We Know Jeff Bezos Today) Didn’t Exactly Begin That Way. . . Saturday, November 3, 2018. – That was before the announcement of the plan to bring a complex of subsidized Amazon offices to Queens.       

But there are other concerns about what Amazon represents, concerns that we have also raised about the commercializing privatization of the libraries, turning libraries into consumer- and private enterprise-driven environments.  They are also to be worried about.  These are the kind of concerns about libraries that have been raised in the books about the dangerous transfigurations of libraries written by John E. Buschman and Ed D’Angelo, respectively:  “Dismantling the Public Sphere- Situating and Sustaining Librarianship In the Age of the New Public Philosophy,” and “Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and the Public Good.”  *  We've written about these books previously.

Ana Levy-Lyons began her November Amazon sermon vividly referencing Amazons’ ruthless strongarm tactics, but immediately segued to reference Amazon’s allure, dressed up in the notion that Amazon serves an ideal, consumerism, specifically that Amazon’s ruthlessness is permitted, even embraced because it serves:

    . . .  one thing, one shimmering, grand ideal: what the consumer wants. And what does the consumer want? Cheap goods. We want to buy stuff – a lot of stuff – and pay as little as possible. Amazon gets us there. . . .  it is quick, it’s easy, and it gets delivered to our door. What’s not to like?

Low prices: it is hard to object or criticize low prices when about half the population of the United States is so financially on the edge, living paycheck to paycheck, that they are not in a financial position to cover basic expenses if confronted with an emergency like the need for unexpected medical care, and they don’t have enough money to come up with even a $400 emergency expense.  And it is hard to, at the same time, remain conscious enough under these circumstances to factor in how Amazon’s subtractions from the economy are actually contributing to this desperation for those low prices.  (As we were writing this post a New York Times Sunday op-ed was published making exactly this point.)

But in her exceedingly eloquent sermon Ana Levy-Lyons went on to speak of how the reduction that redefines us as just mere consumers in the Amazon world flattens our dimensionality as human beings, so that we thus lack the “larger, fuller expressions of our selfhood,” and are reduced to the part of us that just “takes from the world.”  The sermon delivered in a church and Rev. Levy-Lyons’ diagnosis included her verdict that was a de-spiritualization.*

(* Shades of Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, and his choir, who in all their Hallelujah glory have aided our library fight mightily on many occasions.)

Of the list of illustrative examples she offered, most resonant for library defenders and those steeped in the world of books was that, as “consumers we want to buy books and music as cheaply as possible,” but as full-fledged “spiritual beings having a human experience on this earth . .  what we may really want is for writers and musicians to be able to make a living.”

Levy-Lyons also observed that this lack of human dimensionality is associated with a dementia-ality, a dementia that skews reality, that in a mixed-up way views the raising up the market forces of consumerism as paramount as an expression of freedom, democracy at work, if you will, even as an  expression of our individuality.

In his book, “Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library,” Ed D’Dangelo discussed the threat these same ideas pose to the tradition of libraries (p.107) saying the “genius of market populism” is that it is sold “to the public as a form of liberation,” and, because it is supposedly inherently virtuous, the dictates of the market should therefore be allowed to control the managing all society’s choices, including with respect to the delivery of information.  But D’Angelo notes that the market does not necessarily promote democracy at all, and that these shifts of decision making over to the private sector mean that “in a very real sense we have returned to the feudal ages when power was private and the public realm had fallen into decay . .”
                       
One only has to take a step back to remind oneself that, as we witness Amazon quickly making its owner Jeff Bezos the wealthiest man in the world seemingly out of nowhere, plus the accompanying and very fast escalation of wealth inequality during these recent years, the results of unbridled capitalistic forces increasingly deliver more astounding inequality.  The results are far from egalitarian.  If the “freedom” offered in our market-structured consumer economy is to “vote” with our dollars, the opportunity to vote is extraordinarily unequal.  Not only doesn’t the one-man-one-vote ideal apply to the marketplace, but with economic inequality spiraling out of control, the power of the ballot box has been substantially diluted by the influence of money in politics.

D’Angelo, argues for libraries as the kind of public sphere realms essential to support true democracy; he says (p. 117) that “democracy requires rational deliberation in a public domain about matters of common interest” and that “even ideal markets fail to construct public spaces or to recognize common interests.”

Other commentators like Nathan Robinson, editor-in-chief at Current Affairs magazine, posit that the example of properly functioning libraries, which are traditionally egalitarian, publicly controlled and not controlled by a company, are regarded as a threat seen as “dangerous to a certain kind of a free-market orthodoxy” by those who want everything filtered through market capitalism structures.

That trepidation and urge to preclude or ward off such examples of successful alternatives to evermore pervasive market forces, whether it be a consciously developed strategy, or a response to subliminal impulse, may explain the efforts of monied interests to dismantle traditional libraries and recast them in a capitalist mode reflecting, to use John Buschman’s words (Dismantling the Public Sphere, p. 8), a “radically market-oriented public philosophy toward public cultural institutions.”

Flipping the question around, Buschman asks: If libraries are not providing an alternative model, are not serving democratic ideals, “What public purpose is served by public funding of” projects that “are imitative of the private sector?  What right do we have to public funding to compete with [other?] businesses.  Perhaps more importantly, does society need another model of media-dominated, entertainment oriented consumerism in its public institutions?”

Buschman suggests that the key to attaining the equilibrium whereby libraries will provide the needed democratic public sphere is to avoid the “‘steering mechanisms’ of money and power (i.e. corporate-dominated mass media).”

Buschman, serving up themes very much aligned with Ms. Levy-Lyons' sermon, writes (p. 121) that essentially the idea of a consumerish “give ‘em what they want” focus of librarianship, putting up “a large number of `hot’ items on the shelf to compete with bookstore chains” and quantifying the value of a library only through popularity ignores “merit or lasting value” in curating selections.  While not arguing that libraries should be unresponsive to the public, Buschman says that “customer-driven librarianship abandons a number of public sphere roles.”  “The first of these,” he says, is “our role in organized social memory and rational discourse in a democracy.”  He says that the consumer driven fixation on “exclusively what is popular at the moment” by definition “abandons the public sphere goal of a plurality of ‘voices’ and viewpoints on anything not ‘hot’ to a present or future reader.”  He reminds us that “there is a reason some services are in the public sector; their value is very real but difficult to measure and requires a different kind of judgement and management.”

Levy-Lyons similarly bemoans the lack of collaborative curation and creation of value with the Amazon/Bezos “populist” vision being an “anti-expert, anti-intellectual” belief that, high ideals should be set aside “as a matter of principle” and that “the customers around whom the world spins” should “have the final word.”
                               
But returning to the question of democracy, freedom . . .  as well as whether the consumer really does have the last word in what Levy-Lyons calls this “free market ideology on steroids”:  Levy-Lyons makes the case that while the public is sold the notion that Amazon and the market represent “free choice,” that’s hardly the case:

    . . .  here’s the irony: as humans – in our full selfhood as humans – we have free will. But as consumers today, we are far from free. Our consumer desires are manipulated and even manufactured from scratch by corporations. This has always happened to some extent, but today’s technologies allow that manipulation to get deep inside us, using data about our habits and preferences to craft unique campaigns tailored to evoke our particular longing for products. Virtual assistants, like Amazon’s “Alexa,” and smart appliances – entire smart homes! – anticipate, suggest, and even order for you the thing you’re gonna’ want next.

You can read or listen to Ms. Levy-Lyons sermon in full (about 1,100 words), for her examples respecting the implications of this in terms of the devastation of our environment, our politics, nationally and also around the world (Brazil, and perhaps she should now add Andalusia).

As for expressions of individuality as another likely barometer of freedom, Rev. Levy-Lyons suggests that individuality is also suppressed in the Amazon controlled market world. As an example that should particularly concern those who care about books and book culture, Levy-Lyons suggests that the Amazon changes that are bleeding money out of the book world (with the consequent layoff of marketing and sales people and editors and the shrinking of author royalties and advances) mean that, “publishers are less able to take risks on first-time authors or authors with some off-beat weird idea.”  She says that these changes are continuing to happen so fast that she knows “for a fact that” if she had pitched her book, “No Other Gods: The Politics of the Ten Commandments,” even one year later, her “publisher would not have bought it.”  Thus “authors are finding it harder and harder to make a living.”

In her sermon Ms. Levy-Lyons recommended and encouraged her audience to go to a bookstore to buy Franklin Foer’s “World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech” (2017).  Quite possibly, she drew upon it a fair amount when she composed her sermon.  The Penguin (its publisher) site for the book (or you could dare to go to Amazon) says in the overview it provides:

    Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. . . .

    . . . There have been monopolists in the past but today's corporate giants have far more nefarious aims. They’re monopolists who want access to every facet of our identities and influence over every corner of our decision-making.

That’s ominous when you think, as we noted at the outset, that Amazon is selling nearly half the books in the country, that it collects enough information to know almost “every fact of our identities and . . decision-making,” and that with the roots of its origin and plus continuing links to the military and surveillance industries, it chose to launch itself by venturing into the book industry, which it both decimated and now dominates.

The hope that Re. Levy-Lyons offered to confront Amazon is to act collectively, to stop viewing ourselves as competing individuals and that we can instead create our reality collectively.  She gave the example of a collective of antiquarian book sellers that acted together in concert to protect one of their group when Amazon was victimizing them.

Of course, that acting together collectively in concert requires the public realm, public domain spaces for “rational deliberation” and public discourse about “matters of common interest” that writers like D’Angelo and Bushman are reminding us that we need, and reminding us that these are reasons we need traditional libraries organized so that’s what they provide. . .

. .   These public realm spaces, the same spaces so valuable and essential to us if we are to stand up to forces like Amazon, are the same spaces that are under threat from forces like Amazon.*  But, for the time being, we still have our churches and houses of worship.

(* Footnote and PS: And that is why the  New York Times architect critic Michael Kimmelman was wildly misguided when, responding to the announced arrival of Amazon, he suggested Amazon involve itself in providing our public libraries.  (Amazon is already involved anyway.)  See: Michael Kimmelman’s Unfortunate Suggestion That Amazon Invest In NYC’s Public libraries (per Eric Klinenberg)- See: “Amazon’s HQ2 Will Benefit From New York City. But What Does New York Get?”)

Michael Kimmelman’s Unfortunate Suggestion That Amazon Invest In NYC’s Public libraries (per Eric Klinenberg)- See: “Amazon’s HQ2 Will Benefit From New York City. But What Does New York Get?”

There are a lot of people alarmed and/or already woeful about the announcement of the imminent arrival of an Amazon headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, even people who have not fully thought through everything there may be to get alarmed about in connection with the book industry-disrupting and imagination-defying growth of Amazon.*  One of those people quickest out of the starting gate with such opinions, is New York Times architect critic Michael Kimmelman.  See: Amazon’s HQ2 Will Benefit From New York City. But What Does New York Get?

(* See: National Notice- Interesting to Think That it All Began With BOOKS? Except That Amazon and World’s Wealthiest Man (As We Know Jeff Bezos Today) Didn’t Exactly Begin That Way. . . )

The arrival of Amazon is a huge topic so people will have to do a lot of thinking about it and it is too much to expect that everyone is going to get all their best thoughts together quickly.  This time, Kimmelman, who has done some good work in the past, has some worthwhile observations, but he also falters somewhat unfortunately with respect to his key recommendation.
                               
On the perspicacious side, Kimmelman wonders how well a huge tech company like Amazon will fit in in New York City:

    . . .  the tech industry isn’t culturally urban. Its insularity, secrecy, its bedrock libertarianism and algorithmic notions about progress, land use and corporate independence have never easily meshed with the slow, open-society, regulatory-heavy, greater-good mission that defines city living. Disruption is a virtue and instrument of efficiency in tech circles. But it isn’t repetitiously welcome where protections and a focus on collective welfare remain abiding democratic ideals.

As the title of Kimmelman’s essay implies and as he, in his essay, then directly states, for Kimmelman the, “The question for city residents is what these companies give back.”

That’s hardly the only question, but Kimmelman presents one particularly unfortunate suggested answer.  He suggests that Amazon make “self-interested” investments in NYC public libraries per the thinking of “Eric Klinenberg”:

In turn, Amazon, which dominates the book market, could, up front, make self-interested commitments in local school programs and, as Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University, advocates, in public libraries, our most vibrant, multipurpose community hubs.

In other words, Kimmelman clearly sounds as if he is dangerously suggesting that Amazon engage in exactly the kind of public/private partnerships that library administration officials repetitiously crow that they are eager to promote now-a-days, projects that unfortunately commercialize the libraries and are all the more and especially dangerous when the private corporation `partners’ in them are acting `self-interestedly’ . .

Where do we start?  Do we start by saying Amazon, the great disruptor, has already been “partnering” with NYC library administration officials to promote more reading of digital books (in the subways)?  Do we wonder at the fact that Kimmelman, bypassing others (for instance John E. Buschman and Ed D'Angelo), is constituting Eric Klinenberg, “a sociologist at New York University,” as the new automatic go-to expert on what is desirable with respect to public investment in libraries after Klinenberg’s just publishing a book that he just recently put together in short order as the result of his being approached for a “collaborative project” on NYC libraries by the Revson Foundation?—  While Mr. Klinenberg describes the Revson Foundation as a “fierce champion of public libraries,” the foundation can probably more accurately be described as deeply involved in promoting (with behind-the-scenes funding) the current notion of selling libraries and turning them into shrink-and-sink real estate deals, their book collections drastically reduced, the talents and contributions of librarians dramatically deemphasized.

Do we point out that what the Revson Foundation promotes as the new libraries of the 21st Century future is all tied in with the neo-liberal, capitalist, private-market orthodoxy that promotes public/private partnerships between libraries and benefactors like Amazon?  Do we point out how Amazon’s ethos of, and roots in, data collection and its ties to the military, going back and forward, is gratingly at odds with the tradition of libraries as the havens of privacy as free speech requires?  That's what's makes their acting `self-interestedly’ far more scary if they partner on library investments.*

(* Next we are bound to hear that Queens City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, who oversees libraries- and their sell-offs- and who has made himself initially visible opposing Amazon's arrival, will fold his opposition to Amazon when Amazon promises such library investments because Van Bramer doesn't believe that concerns about Booz Allen or surveillance in the libraries is real enough to worry about.)

Kimmelman once wrote a very important column of his own lambasting the NYPL's Central Library Plan following in the footsteps of Ada Louise Huxtable’s very last column, published just weeks before her death (Wall Street Journal: Undertaking Its Destruction, December 3, 2012), in which she railed against what they were doing to Manhattan’s central libraries and the elimination of books.  Mr. Kimmelman (New York Times: Critic’s Notebook- In Renderings for a Library Landmark, Stacks of Questions, January 29, 2013) likewise scorned how the “potential Alamo of engineering, architecture and finance would be irresponsible,” the result of “a not-uncommon phenomenon among cultural boards, a form of architectural Stockholm syndrome.”   We think he also got caught up with the fact that what was happening to the libraries, with its real estate deal underpinnings, was something very different from what was being touted.

When it comes to Amazon, however, Kimmelman seems to have some more catching up to do. . .

. . .  By the way, not too long ago, Forbes ran an op-ed arguing that Amazon should simply replace libraries with Amazon retail outlets–  “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money” (out of embarrassment Forbes quickly took the piece down): At least Kimmelman is not going so far as to make that exact same argument.

National Notice Updates and Republishes Citizens Defending Libraries Post About Amazon’s Huge Growth Beginning With BOOKS– Except It Didn’t begin There: Think DARPA Instead (per New Op-Ed In the NY Times)

National Notice, written by Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White, took over and updated a previous Citizens Defending Libraries post: Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS! Amazon, With Bezos Now The World’s Wealthiest Man At Its Helm, Tops $1 Trillion!

The update: Interesting to Think That it All Began With BOOKS? Except That Amazon and World’s Wealthiest Man (As We Know Jeff Bezos Today) Didn’t Exactly Begin That Way. . . (Saturday, November 3, 2018)

The updates?  They stem from a new op-ed in the New York Times about the connections between the tech industry and the military.  There’s lots to learn about the connection of Amazon’s wealthy founder Jeff Bezos and his seriously connected grandfather, a key senior figure involved in starting up DARPA (the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which started the Internet, which . . .   Oh well, you'll just have to read the National Notice article for more, but one of the subjects it gets into while considering books is surveillance and it will get you wondering further about the perhaps not so accidental reasons for Amazon’s unusual success.

Orchestrating Another PR-Grabbing Move to Telegraph Supersedence of The Traditional, Curated Library With Distracting Technological Glitz, The NYPL Starts Posting To Instagram Public Domain Books Already Freely Available on The Internet

The story is available from the Wall Street Journal (NYC Library Takes Novel Approach, Posting Books to Instagram The service, dubbed ‘Insta Novels,’ will be available to users of the photo- and video-sharing platform, by Charles Passy, August 22, 2018), but to read it there on the internet you’ll have to get through the Journal’s paywall if you are not already one of its business news oriented subscribers.  The article is, however, also available through Morningstar/Dow-Jones.    

Swaggering fecklessly into the internet to emphasize yet again its asserted faith that technology, represents the future of libraries, supplanting the age old traditions of curated collections and physical books, the NYPL will put what it calls “Insta Novels” on Instagram, the social service network owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. (That’s the same Facebook now involved in current censorship scandals, the scandal being how Facebook, subject to the wrong sort of influences, is censoring valuable content and free speech that it shouldn’t be censoring).

In a previous and similar highly promoted initiative, library administration officials partnered with Amazon to encourage the reading of digital books, back then it was to be on the subway. 

Previous digital reading campaign promotion (some of it)

The few works the NYPL is putting up on Facebook's Insatgram are public domain, and hence already readily available.

Library officials told the Wall Street Journal’s Charles Passy that the idea was to promote the  “NYPL brand” communicating in connection with that promotion “that libraries are changing with the times and fully adapting to the digital era.”  (“Fully adapting”: That certainly makes it sound like it's imperative that libraries adapt need to a lot.)   Just in case anyone missed the point about the NYPL’s fixations on a digital future for its libraries vs. what libraries have always done so successfully, Christopher Platt, the NYPL’s chief branch library officer, took the opportunity of this Instagram stunt to synchronistically dismiss the tradition of physical libraries.  He grabbed and combined some adjectives and nouns to say in a denigrating way that (aside from Instagram stunts?) the NYPL wants people to understand that libraries are not only “brick-and-mortar places full of dusty books.” — Achoo!  Anyone feel that administrative chill?

The Journal article included this reaction supplied by Citizens Defending Libraries:

Michael D. D. White, co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries, a New York City-based watchdog group, said the emphasis on online reading works against the idea of libraries as physical spaces where books are curated and knowledge is shared. 

It diminishes the sense of place and purpose,” he said.

When does a library stop being a library?  At the last NYPL meeting in September the trustees during a report about the NYPL’s recent forays into private partnerships (another issue to consider) were told of the NYPL’s expectations that it will go into the film business with HBO to make movies!  Hooray for Hollywood?: That is something we will have to delve into at some later time.

Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS! Amazon, With Bezos Now The World’s Wealthiest Man At Its Helm, Tops $1 Trillion!

Amazon growth charts, one of revenues and one of returns since Amazon went public.  Not the respective flat lines in each and consider what that means.

Interesting to think that it all began with BOOKS!

Amazon is now the second U.S. company (following Apple) to top $1 trillion in value.  That makes Jeff Bezos ($167 billion) world's richest man.

As Yasha Levine covered in his book “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet” Amazon is an internet company engaged in surveillance as a key part of its profit model and it works with the federal government and the federal government’s military and CIA.  As part of the sales blurb (on Amazon) for Mr. Levine’s book states:

Levine examines the private surveillance business that powers tech-industry giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, revealing how these companies spy on their users for profit, all while doing double duty as military and intelligence contractors. Levine shows that the military and Silicon Valley are effectively inseparable: a military-digital complex that permeates everything connected to the internet, even coopting and weaponizing the antigovernment privacy movement that sprang up in the wake of Edward Snowden.

For more on what we have already covered on this see: Reading on the Internet vs. Reading a Book You Picked Up Browsing In Your Library: Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet” and for even more that is relevant coming from Mr. Levine’s book; Self Proclaimed As Fighting Surveillance, Library Freedom Project Is Tied to Tor Service With Its Deep Ongoing Connections, Including Financing, To The U.S. Government.

Second biggest U.S. Company as of September 2018?  Amazon grew very fast to do that.

Amazon, which began in a converted garage of Bezos’ rented home, launched on the internet in July of 1995.  That’s just 23 years ago.

The story is that Bezos, not particularly a book lover for any reason, coming out of an unusually successful Wall Street hedge fund, D. E. Shaw & Co., was not so to speak “following his bliss” when he decided to start his internet sales company with books.  He was instead selecting books from amongst “a list of 20 products” he was considering theoretically as the result of what where essentially mathematical computations:

Bezos eventually decided that his venture would sell books over the Web, due to the large worldwide market for literature, the low price that could be offered for books, and the tremendous selection of titles that were available in print.

The Unites States, in 2013, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis was contracting out “about 70 percent” of its “intelligence budget.”  That figure is probably, for the most part not calculated considering most of the surveillance being done by companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook as talked about by Levine in his book.

What is clear, as written about by Mr. Levine in his book and by Tim Shorrock, author of “Spies for Hire- The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing,” is how intertwined the intelligence community is with private sector companies with an interdependence that has a lot of implications for who succeeds or fails in the private market place.  If we are talking about small start up companies trying to establish themselves, both these authors write about how the efforts of those companies may be aided and quietly, nay secretly, assisted by the government.  Both authors write about how “In-Q-Tel” was founded in 1999 (an interesting date in terms of ramping up electronic surveillance) as the CIA’s venture capitalist company operating in Silicon Valley “to invest in start-up that aligned with the agency’s intelligence needs.”  (Yasha Levine p. 174)  And “through its In-Q-Tel venture capital fund, the CIA invested in all sorts of companies that mined the Internet for open-source intelligence” that’s “information that it could grab from the public web: Videos, personal blogs, photos, and posts on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram amd Google+.” (Yasha Levine p. 188 -189)

In-Q-Tel “works with the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology” to find companies with products with intelligence application and then “buys equity positions in these firms— many of which are managed by former intelligence officials.”  (Shorrock p.16) Along with technology incubation funding from the CIA and other agencies “high-tech companies would be offered a huge natural market—the Intelligence Community and the federal government, plus assistance in testing and perfecting their products for use by the private sector.”  (Shorrock p.144) The interrelationships between the Intelligence Community and the tech community are very widespread, Stephanie O’Sullivan, the CIA’s director for science and technology said in 2006: “There is no technology out there that is not relevant to our mission.”  (Shorrock p.145)

Citing In-Q-Tel as just one example of “private-partnerships” with the technology industry that serve as a “convenient cover for the perpetuation of corporate interests” Tim Shorrock in his book (p. 365) describes In-Q-Tel’s “partnerships” as “masking the fact that the CIA’s investments amounted to a hefty government subsidy that allowed companies to do things like hire lobbyiests to expand their market share.”  And the companies with those expanded market shares are likely to get a pass for when the private surveillance they engage in may flout  laws—   Citing the defense cavalierly offered by the the Chamber of Commerce for AT&T’s secret spying on U.S. citizens, Shorrock writes that “the ultimate result of the privatization of intelligence activities” is that the Chamber’s an amicus defense brief ventures to describe as a “friendly `partnership’” a “secret alliance between business and government that may be one of the most egregious examples of a corporation skirting U.S. privacy and foreign intelligence laws” (p. 366)

In-Q-Tel, designed with a focus on incubating start-ups, is one end, the small company end, of the spectrum of the government as a presence injecting itself into the picking of winners and losers in the market place.  And In-Q-Tel is only one of those government market influences out there; for example, there is also a cousin company of British Intelligence heritage, defense and intelligence research company, QinetiQ Group a privatizing ownership share of which was transferred to the Carlyle Group.  Shorrock writes of George Tenet, former head of the CIA (under whom In-Q-Tel was launched) being on the QinetiQ  board.  The U-less Qs in the names of both these companies are intended to merrily invoke the Q of the James Bond films who equipped 007 with all his disguised tech gadgets.  QinetiQ’s model and influence on the market is different from In-Q-Tel's, buying up other tech companies for Intelligence Community purposes after becoming a privatized part of the Carlyle Group.  (One thing they like is robots.)

The other end of the spectrum of how the government is a presence injecting itself into the picking of winners and losers in the market place is the big company end.  And obviously, Amazon is now a really big company.  (For instance, circa 2014 Amazon was reportedly providing the CIA with cloud computing services pursuant to a $600 million contract.)

When the companies that the United States relies on to do its intelligence work are really huge, when those companies have most of the available experts with security clearances working for them (at higher salaries than individuals working for the government), when those companies have most of the collected data and most of the systems that are up and running that the government has grown dependent on them for, plus when those companies have huge government derived income streams that they can recycle into lobbying for the big shares of secret government budgets that they are allowed to know and can talk about, but that the public isn't allowed to find out about, there is a question of who is running the show.  This question about contracting out is one that Tim Shorrock delves into and contemplates at length in his book mulling it over from many different perspectives.  Finally, while government officials may or may not lose the upper hand, government officials can nevertheless direct huge influence about who amongst these big companies will be the winners or losers in the market.

The implications of huge private corporations having so much power in the Intelligence Community are more pronounced given that, when individuals work for such private corporations, unlike the individuals who work directly for government, loyalties run in the direction of making profit.  By corporate law definition, that means profit first, not patriotism.  Furthermore, loyalties can be bought or sold.  And private corporations pursuing private profit are becoming increasingly multi-national in character and thus untethered from the patriotisms of any particular nations, including ours, that may hire them.  Hiring out to other private firms or interests (not nations) as they are allowed to do, they may be acting with no national patriotism at all.

Bezos started with books, but in time expanded Amazon’s offerings beyond books, including, initially, to some of the other products he was supposed to have been considering early on, music, by selling CDs and videos.  . . .  Nowadays if you want to see a video, a movie, particularly anything you might consider vintage or historic, say you want to see something with a political message, like “Seven Days In May” (about a military coup against the U.S. President in the Kennedy era) it’s likely you may find that your best chance, your path of least resistance to easily view the film easily will be to pay for it to stream through Amazon.  This is a far cry from the days when pretty much everyone’s  Friday night film viewing came from their local, often independently owned, video store.  In 1988, the year after the home video market surpassed box office revenues, with the number of stores leveling off, (the Blockbuster chain was simultaneously buying another chain to expand) there were 25,000 video stores nationally (about 45,000 other outlets renting tapes); in 1997 there were 23,036.

Video stores are vanishing practically to the point of non-existence, including in New York City. . .  Amazon, with probably lower overhead and fewer employees involved, will charge you about as much, maybe more, than your local video store once charged.  Did you once have a relationship with your local video store operator who knew your tastes, what to recommend intimately?  Think of what Amazon knows about you, learning more each time you rent a film like “Seven Days In May.”  Once Amazon just knew the books you read, but now as you might browse to look to possibly buy almost everything in your life through Amazon, Amazon now knows so much more.

In 1988, months after starting it's expansion into music, Amazon announced its expansion beyond books.  At the same time it bought a service that would keep track of your friends and their birthdays, so, for example, Amazon could suggest when it was time to order them presents.

In November 2007 Amazon introduced its, three year in development, Kindle (continually connecting you to the Internet) to sell ebooks, staring with 90,000 books (more than four times as many as Sony offered at the time and 90 percent of the current best sellers) and vowing that its “goal” was “to have every printed book on earth available for instant download.”  Of course, whatever their benefits, the ways in which e-books in contradistinction to physical books, are problematic are manifold, especially in terms of issues of surveillance.

By the beginning of 2010, hardly two years later, with the “nascent” ebook market still “only a few years old,” Amazon was clearly dominating it with an estimated “80 percent of e-book purchases” and by the end of 2010 a “full 50% share.”   The difference in those two percentages offered (books vs. market share) may reflect the low price that Amazon was charging for every book.

Offering best sellers for $9.99, Amazon left no room for any profit margin as it sought to claim virtually the entire market.  In 2013, author (and lawyer) Scott Turow said that Amazon was using “unfair tactics” trying to “monopolize” the e-book market.  He said:

If you price e-books well below the cost, which is what they did for years, it both destroys physical book stores and drives the reading public into the e-book, which of course Amazon dominates.

As the point is made in Scott Turow's quote above, Amazon's disruption of the market not only drove e-book competitors out of the e-book market, but also drove brick and mortar book stores and stores selling physical books into bankruptcy as well.  Furthermore, publishers haven't liked Amazon very well either because they too have found themselves impoverished by Amazon's model.  Their impoverishment can limit support given to authors.

Should we all just relax and surrender to the fact that Amazon dominates the market while pushing digital books?  Citizens Defending Libraries reported last year how New York City library officials were partnering to further promote digital books in a program that featured prizes from Amazon.  See: NYC Library Officials Partner To Promote Digital Books With Prizes From Amazon.

A New York Times Sunday Review Op-ed this week by sociologist and author Eric Klinenberg reminded us that this summer Forbes Magazine ran published an article arguing that Amazon should replace libraries with its own retail outlets, and claimed that most Americans would prefer a free-market option. But, the public response "was so overwhelmingly negative that Forbes deleted the article from its website." 

Amazon has grown fast because its model is to grow fast.  Although its valuation, its gross revenues and its market share keep growing dramatically, Amazon's net revenues have been nearly flat.  Everything goes into expansion.  There have been times in the past when that strategy was problematic and close to edge, a risk to have no profit going out to shareholders, but whatever threats that lack of net return seemed to pose to company or to Jeff Bezos as its leader financing always came to the rescue, and they both survived. . . . and continued to take over market after market.

Amazon should be a walking poster-child advertisement for antitrust litigation and legislation.  Instead, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, the newspaper for the national capital where such issues should be discussed and where the careers and day to day lives of the all the legislators and government officials responsible for the enforcement such antitrust measures are reported on.

The Washington Post has always had a special role in influencing the nation.  We are pretty sure it was Peter Dale Scott, credited with coining the term the "deep state," who in one of his interviews said that the Washington Post along with the New York Times and the LA Times was a preferred outlet by the CIA when it wanted to get its stories out to the public (often without telltale fingerprints).  Whether that's exactly the case, the Washington Post has certainly played an important role historically for the CIA in this regard.

If it all started with BOOKS, why Amazon?  Why not Barnes and Noble?  Why isn't Barnes and Noble now the second biggest company in the United States?

An interesting comparative analysis points out that as of Spring 2017 Amazon increases would have returned 48,197% since their May 15, 1997 (before their 1988 announced expansion beyond books) debut as a public company.  Barnes & Noble would have only returned 26%. Borders went bankrupt! Some other comparatives: Walmart-  +96%; Best Buy: +38% ;  Macys:+19%: Target: +4%: Staples: -50%. 

And Amazon has become the second trillion dollar company in the U.S. even as sales of the digital books it is pushing are dropping for years in succession.

The Influence of Media Ownership On Content As Foreseen By Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (And How Fitting That The Pivotal “Voice-of-God” Scene Was Filmed In One of World’s Greatest Libraries)

Scene filmed in great world library: Peter Finch playing Howard Beale escorted by Robert Duvall as network executive Frank Hackett to meet Arthur Jensen, Chairman of the owning conglomerate, played by Ned Beatty.

It’s a scene filmed in one of the greatest libraries of the world (at least, it was then) and it is also important to talk about that scene in terms of some very important matters concerning libraries.  This is something we’ll come back to . . .

Watching Paddy Chayefsky’s masterful film “Network” again it is remarkable to think that it was written and made as long ago as it was.  It came out in 1976 Gol Darn it!  (Chayefsky’s “mad as hell” script would have used actual swear words.) The thing that makes it such a devilishly clever satire is the way that it moves in undetectable micro increments from the sane actual world we once thought we were living in to a shudderingly ghastly caricature of what the world might be in the process of becoming without ever letting you put your finger on exactly where the line was being crossed to move between the two.

It’s a testament to screenwriter Chayefsky’s perspicacious insights about society’s direction at the time that the film still works now at least as well as it did when it was first released. If anything, the seemingly increasing transgressive absurdities of life and shifting norms of 2018 might have us wondering whether the crossover point in the film where you can pinpoint that happening has actually moved: A reality TV star president who was elected in an election where the head of the CBS network commented with shameless accuracy about the unremitting, nonstop media coverage of Trump's campaign for office: “It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.”
                    
Rewatching “Network” might also reveal another startling fact to people who have been engaged in trying to save New York’s public libraries recently: A pivotal scene in the film [Spoiler Alert!] occurs in the 42nd Street Central Reference Library.  It was filmed in the Trustees opulent meeting room and on the grand Carrère & Hastings designed central staircase leading up to the room.  There is even a brief glimpse into the adjacent office of the NYPL president.

Scenes from "Network" filmed in the NYPL's trustees room (including a glimpse of the NYPL president's office) and then, current day, the NYPL trustees meeting in the room.  Also, the Thomas Jefferson inscription over the fireplace and the dedication of the building to serve the public.

The scene is where the Howard Beale character, the crazed former news anchor played by Peter Finch in the role for which he posthumously won best actor, hears the voice of God.  He undergoes a conversion as a result that sets up the film’s final denouement.  Beale doesn’t hear actual voice of God; he hears the voice of capitalism pretending to be God and bring him enlightenment that allows him to preach its gospel.  What he actually hears is the voice of Arthur Jensen (played by Ned Beatty) the Chairman of the global conglomerate that has acquired the network on which Beale is now a rating’s success as the “mad prophet of the airwaves.”

“Enlightened,” Beale about-faces from his populist message to preach the new capital establishment-praising dogma and his ratings plunge, but Chairman Jensen, personally a fan of this new skew to Beale’s script won’t allow Beale’s show to be cancelled.  This plot pivot deftly allows Chayefsky a jump that skewers the effects of corporate ownership on media content from two directions: First, as the movie had done up to that point, it skewered the pursuit of corporate profit-at-any-social-cost as seen in the chase of ratings down the swirling drain of lowest common denominator bad taste, and then it flips to skewer the penchant for wealth and corporate capitalism to want to narcissistically bask in laudatory self compliment even if delivery of that package is insincerely just purchased and paid for.

For starker relief, this satiric critique is presented against the backdrop of a mythically imagined legacy of great newsmen, sober gentlemen in the mold of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid, who were sagaciously grounded in the notion that there is a sacred obligation to transmit the news with fidelity.  Not that the real state of affairs things at CBS News and elsewhere in the news media influencing our country were historically ever exactly what they seemed when the mythos of that veneer was being polished.  Nevertheless, in the early scenes of the film, the pitch perfect performances of William Holden playing Max Schumacher and Peter Finch playing Beale (before his madness flowers) do evoke the gravitas of such men that in a previous time it felt were so reassuring and reliable to have at the helm of the Fourth Estate looking out for our interests as if they were obligated by a public trust.

 -   In case anyone has forgotten, the nation’s broadcasting airwaves are supposed to be a public trust, actually a public commons owned by the American public itself, not the corporations who now control it and treat it as their private property to be bought, sold and used any way they will. Additionally, the model for ownership and tending of the airwaves didn’t have to be one where this precious asset was handed off to profit making corporations controlling virtually everything and wanting to direct all your attention to advertising.  There were other possible non-profit models that could have taken hold.  (Read Tim Wu’s books the “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” and the “The Attention Merchants: The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads.”)

We remember Michael Moore with his characteristic glee explaining what he saw to be the Achilles heel of capitalism in his ability to get his message out: So long as I am making a profit for them, they don’t pay attention to what I say. .  And so, he said, he could keep saying it.  (If you find a link for this send it to us please.)  That bravado is somewhat contradicted by what almost happened to Moore and his anti-George W. Bush message when his publisher wanted to pulp unpublished his book “Stupid White Men: ...And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!”  The publisher viewed its point of view as unsuitable for the post 9/11 era.  The book became a best seller and thus made a huge profit for his publisher, but had to be rescued by brave librarians focusing on principles quite apart from the pursuit of profit who were the only reason it wound up being published.
 
The ability to get a message out and to get out content that has trenchant integrity is an escalating concern in our world given the increasing conglomeration of the media giants and the dwindling number of owners particularly when you consider questions about the way such conglomerates engaged in all sorts of other businesses may see things.  For instance, AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner is regarded as a first significant beachhead for a wave of further consolidations of media company ownership.  It generated an article in the New York Times about the possible fate HBO’s future production culture and content:

Media analysts and tech-industry prognosticators look at AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner and wonder about the future of an industry in flux. Hollywood looks at the deal and wonders what’s going to happen to HBO.

See: New York Times- Will AT&T Be Able to Handle HBO? By John Koblin, June 14, 2018.
       
In the article, “Richard Plepler, the smooth-talking, perpetually tanned chief executive of HBO” bravely envisioned that HBO would escape ownership directed change because such an escape was needed for HBO to succeed at what it does, referring to “Mr. Plepler’s view that HBO needs to be left alone in order to thrive.”  More specifically:

“You have to have a Chinese wall between the creative process and everything else,” Mr. Plepler told The New York Times shortly after the deal was announced in 2016. He added that he would be “very surprised” if AT&T did not embrace that.

Of course, the movie “Network” is very much about so-called “Chinese walls,” or the actual lack thereof when it comes to media ownership, first when the business oriented corporate types want to take over network’s news division to make it more of an infotainment ratings success and then later when Chairman Arthur Jensen wants his voice-of-God capitalism gospel preached to the world.  In real life, the corporate types at Networks have leaned hard on the news divisions to suppress news.  Two of the movie docudramas about journalism, “The Insider” (about trying to broadcast a whistle-blower’s revelations about tobacco company lies) and “Truth” (about reporting events leading up to the firing of CBS news anchor Dan Rather and his “60 Minutes” producer Mary Mapes) concern what were actually real life events. . . . 

“Truth” focuses on altercations between Rather, Mapes and their team and the corporate types at CBS in the lead up to their forced departure from the CBS network, but they had altercations before that.   Just recently on Democracy Now, legendary reporter Sy Hersh described how sitting on “photographs of torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib” for weeks the corporate people running the CBS network didn’t want Rather and Mapes to run the news story that was unflattering to the government:

They had had it for two weeks. [And they didn’t run it.]  But, you know, the people doing it, the reporters, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes, the producers, wanted to. But the suits stopped them.

It took a deal to forcing publication with the story coming out simultaneous elsewhere.  Said Hersh of the subsequent Rather and Mapes firings: “It’s too bad. It’s not good to be good at your job in network television. That’s my theory.”

By contrast, Mr. Plepler, head of HBO thinks that at HBO the talent of being good at your job is integral to its success:

“It’s very much part of the DNA of HBO: Talent is sacred,” Mr. Plepler said after the AT&T deal was announced. “They bring the magic into our company. Writers, producers, actors. It’s their gifts that make HBO HBO. It’s pretty clear to anybody who looks at our company from afar — and, in AT&T’s case, more closely — we are a talent-centric place.”

In what could be construed as a plea to his possible future boss, he added: “I can’t imagine, with everything that Randall made clear to us, why would you ever change a winning game? I don’t think they have any intention of doing so.”

(Not mentioned in the article is that a fair amount of HBO's content is also political.)

But is it ever just so simple as declaring an expectation that the ownership of our media will stay on the other side of a “Chinese Wall” and won’t interfere?  Gothamist publisher Jake Dobkin was a panelist at a June 18, 2018 Brooklyn Historical Society discussion about local news in New York City: “RIP Local News?”  In his opening remarks Dobkin spoke about what happened with a planned merger of  DNAInfo and Gothamist, two local news web outlets that, with an acquisition of the Gothamist were both under the ownership of billionaire Joe Rickets. Dobkin explained that the shutdown of both sites by Ricketts, instead of a merger, that occurred when the employees unionized, was unanticipated because it was unanticipated that the employees would unionize.  Dobkin made it seem unfortunate, almost sad that they did unionize.  Mr. Ricketts, a Trump-supporting conservative Republican owner, has a deep antipathy towards unions.  The shutdown was especially scary when it occurred because it raised the possibility all the past reporting on the sites was about to vanish permanently.  In fact, for a while it seemed to; and it could have.

Explaining the misfortune of the shutdowns, Dobkin told the Brooklyn Historical Society that the “owner. .  had never involved himself in the politics of the site.”  Afterwards, noting his statement about Mr. Ricketts non-involvement with the “politics of the site,” we asked Dobkin about reports that even before the unionization occurred, news and information on the acquired site written about Mr. Rickets, was eliminated or rewritten.  Mr. Dobkin dismissed the importance of the reports saying that it was only a few articles and that he had done it with the hope that people would have jobs and be able to feed their families.  In other words, an owner doesn’t even have to ask before editors try to intuit what they may need to do to keep their jobs and livelihoods afloat.

Are you feeling glutted by monopolist mergers?  This week tech columnist Brian X. Chen wrote a column in the New Times, “With Latest Acquisitions, Amazon Continues Its Quest for World Domination,” asking “Does anyone else feel that Amazon is slowly taking over the world?”

Chen noted how Amazon was giving discounts on groceries at Whole Foods to those who became Amazon Prime members, how Amazon had also gained, through its acquisition of PillPack, a license to start shipping pharmaceutical prescriptions in all 50 states, and how it was planning to start up its own delivery services, an “army,” to compete with FedEx, United Parcel Service and the United States Postal Service.  Amazon and its owner Jeff Bezos are also part of media conglomerate universe.  Bezos owns The Washington Post, the most important newspaper in the nation’s capital.  Amazon started by selling books, led people into digital books, ‘kindling” there interest, and sells a vast amount of all other content at its site.  It is now making films while often being a sole source for video streaming much of the historical/vintage content you would once find in the video stores that have gone out of business around the country.

We are told that Mr. Bezos doesn’t want to “control the editorial product” at the Washington Post, that the only micro-management stuff at the paper with which he likes to get weightily involved is “on wonky issues like web-page load time and ease of subscription sign-ups.”  We are even told that the Washington Post wrote a lengthy 2017 article “suggesting that Amazon could become a dangerous monopoly” that Mr. Bezos did not react to. (Gee, Amazon really could?- That might happen in the future?)

There is a certain extreme irony when it comes to writing denials that Mr. Bezos as Washington Post owner will exercise any influence over editorial content at the Post at the very same time that theaters were playing Spielberg’s Oscar-contending “The Post” dramatically lauding the courage of the central character, Katherine Graham, former Washington Post owner, Mr. Bezos’ predecessor, in deciding what content the newspaper would and would not publish when it was presented with the Pentagon Papers. If you want to see the film now, you can get it through Amazon.

Furthermore, one has to figure that the Washington Post almost has to print at least one article about Amazon’s monopolistic tendencies and exploits to help inoculate itself against criticism that such ownership is having exactly the kind of censorship effect.  The test is not whether the Post writes about monopoly and Amazon, but whether any of the legislators in Washington that the Post regularly covers carefully takes up that concern as a cause.  They haven’t.  Lastly, there is also a lot more to criticize about Amazon concerning the immense amount of data it is collecting on everybody in the country and its ties with the CIA and U.S. military.                         

Both these pieces about media monopolies ran in the same edition of the New York Times this week.

Not feeling sufficiently glutted by these mergers yet?  The same day that Brian X. Chen wondered in his Times column whether people noticed that Amazon was taking over the world, the Times ran an editorial noting troublingly that the Disney-Fox merger sailed through exceptionally fast: Opinion- The Disney-Fox Deal Sails Through, a Bit Too Easily, by The Editorial Board, July 1, 2018.  Said the Times:

Government officials appear unconcerned that the combined Disney-Fox will account for about half of the box office revenue nationally this year and about 30 percent of scripted TV programming, according to the Writers Guild of America West, a Hollywood labor union.

    * * * *

 . .  antitrust regulators and judges are usually . . . dubious of horizontal deals like Disney-Fox. In these cases, it’s much easier to show that the combined company would have the power to raise prices and limit choices. In the movie business, for example, Disney already wields considerable clout — its studios accounted for more than a third of box office sales in the first five months of the year. The additional 15 percent share of box office sales that the company will gain through this deal no doubt will increase Disney’s clout when it negotiates with movie-theater chains. For instance, the company might be able to demand top billing for its movies and a bigger share of revenue than smaller studios get. According to a handful of theater owners who talked to The Wall Street Journal last year, Disney has already engaged in such tactics, forcing them to accept more onerous terms if they wanted to show its blockbuster “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”

As for ownership and influence?  The Times noted speculation about whether politics came into play in the Trump administration’s rushed approval.  It noted something to be concerned about Trump-supporting Rupert Murdoch and his family: 

While Disney will not acquire Fox News or the Fox network and stations as part of this deal, the acquisition will make the Murdoch family the largest individual shareholders in Disney, increasing their wealth by billions of dollars.

And the gospel that Murdoch and family will want preached?

Now to conclude with an observation we simply must make: Isn’t it bizarrely appropriate that Paddy Chayefsky’s pivotal voice-of-God scene was filmed in the trustees meeting room one of the world’s greatest libraries with that trustees room masquerading as a corporate board room? . . .

As our New York City libraries are being plundered and shut down, their books eliminated, people are, perforce, and quite likely even by plan, being pushed out to the corporately owned media for their alternatives.  The decisions that shut down and plunder our libraries and banish their books while pushing people more and more into the arms and the technology of the new media empires are being made by boards of trustees that look a lot like multiplied versions of the Arthur Jensen character that Chayefsky’s scripting (and the location scout) put into that library trustees room.  The motivations and rationalizations of these new library trustees are increasingly corporate and free market enterprise-deifying in the same way.

As the public is pushed out and away from the traditional resources of public, nonprofit libraries what will we get instead?: The latest glitz that profit-minded corporations are pushing?  Or will we get their stories about how splendid monopolistic capitalism is?

Unfortunately, whatever we get and will have to live with is real.  It’s not satire.