FULL BLEED: WITH A SHORE LEAVE WRISTWATCH UNDERNEATH MY SLEEVE

Hey, you hear there’s money in publishing? Damn right. A lot of it. Lots of money in movies, too. Oh, and music. Tons of money. It’s just growing on trees, just there for the picking. Don’t even to have to bend over and grab those dollar bills.

I mean, why else would all these tech guys be trying to get in and disrupt these business ecosystems? They’re only interested in making money, so why would they go where it isn’t?

Good question.

Look, even Spotify is changing things up, right? Paying out less while the dudes at the top are cashing out stock. Harper Collins is out there asking its authors to please please please let them feed the LLM mulch machine. For what? LLMs are being fed by scripts that are specifically forbidden from the practice. You ask OpenAI to draw a frame from a Marvel movie and sure thing, man. I’ll get you that and it looks exactly like the original material only worse. But you can sure as hell tell that it’s being traced from someone else’s work. There’s a company that wants to publish eight thousand books a year, in a field that’s already impossible to navigate due to sheer scale. Amazon says “Yeah, dudes, keep ‘em coming.”

These aren’t activities that are undertaken by businesses that have any respect for the work that is created under their aegis. These are the actions of groups that are desperately using whatever means they can to squeeze more capital out of systems that are running past capacity. Already connected to every eyeball on the planet or pair of ears out there and nope, not enough.

These dudes are out there trying to automate the production of content, reduce it to a series of sliders massaging the flavor crystals being dropped onto ones and zeroes that get turned into something like music or art or anything we can perceive. They’re making mush. As cheaply as possible. And they’re trying to do it with music and art and books.

Which is funny, because it’s hard to imagine a time when these things have been more devalued by the markets that trade in them. Napster annihilated the value of recorded music and it’s been a race to the bottom since then. Ebooks were once a brave new market, now they’re the dumping ground for people writing thirty books a year because they can’t stop. Visual art and photography? Yeah, that too.

In the abstract, these things are less valuable then ever. But these absolute geniuses are creating a series of ever more expensive systems to keep pushing units out as quickly as possible. I’m not even going to touch on the pure Anti-Life nature of these units of content being created without actual human input. Were already agreed on this. I’m talking pure economics.

And the economics for art creation suck. To some degree, they always did.

But these geniuses need to make things that will pull in clicks or draw monthly subscriptions (because that’s how books and music and movies and tv shows are sold now) but still cost nearly nothing to produce. But these works, individually, are basically worthless. They only matter as part of a swarming system. Digital distribution has sucked the value out of th8s, but they’re depending on digital distribution to bring in enough money to make that line go up.

Maybe you like me see the problem with this.

Maybe you like me wonder if they’ve figured this out.

So if the money is mostly out of the equation, but for some big whale creators, what’s the game? Where’s the big returns that these guys need in order to justify the huge hardware and resource costs? Aisde from suckering all of the US work force into picking up and depending ont these tools (which only do what people already should be doing), I’m hard pressed to see where this goes. Maybe they believe they can replace the entertainment industry, but that’s an industry that’s in the process of being looted already.

It’s baffling. But then fads and schemes usually are.

Still, it’s a remarkable example of repurposed theft. All the human output that’s fed the internet is convertible into mulch to feed these script systems. And they got away with it because it’s a crime that we really don’t have a name for yet. But then we’ve got crimes like that happening right in front of us right now. Maybe it’s all crimes.

Not sure what’s to be done about it except not put out your work digitally. There’s a thought. The one thing that was going to save independent artist (and instead made ISPs rich after they got the government to foot the bill for all that infrastructure) became the poisoned chalice.

Of course that’s not possible. Not now. But yeah, I don’t have an answer. Just that I know a problem when I see it. The bigger problem is that the big studios and publishers and distribution networks are all complicit in it, which is something else entirely. Yeah.

As for the rest of things, we’re neck-deep in the holidays at least here in the US. Family gatherings, being pulled in too many directions at once, the whole nine yards. I’m trying to smash the outline for The Missing Pieces into a shape that I can work from and hopefully write a first draft before I start the Kickstarter for Fake Believe, likely in April.

I’ll probably continue to put up some short fiction for free here. Nobody buys the goddamn collections and I’d just rather that these things got read.

Happy holidays, everyone.