Numbers and the C Word

I've just reached 1,000 subscribers on this Substack Account

I just want to start by stating I do not believe numbers are everything. Although 19 has quite a big impact, more on that later.

In the dizzying, beautiful, repugnant, delightful, vile world of social media, numbers mean less and less but all that aside, I’m very glad to have an audience of potentially 1,000 people on Substack who occasionally read my scrawlings.

I have been reflecting on how this weird new world has developed over the last 25 years and the increasing impact this is having on our world.

I used to buy a newspaper in a shop, it was normal, I’d sit down in a cafe and read a newspaper. I haven’t done that in maybe 15 years.

I even wrote sporadic columns for the Guardian and Independent newspapers in the UK. Actual print on paper information distribution, I think I still have some cuttings in a box somewhere.

Back in the 90’s I’d write 500, or sometimes 1,000 word articles and they would literally pay me actual money for my efforts. Not much, maybe £3 or £400, but what that illustrates is there was a functioning economic system with print on paper media that made paying a writer possible.

Of course back then, I couldn’t write something they didn’t want or didn’t agree with and have it distributed to a wide audience. There was only one channel to get your writing ‘out there.’ The gatekeepers who decided what would and would not be published were in total control. I’m not saying they were evil, (some of them were) but due to the technology available, that was they way things had worked for at least a couple of hundred years.

And yes, we have gatekeepers now, just a very small handful of stupidly rich, powerful and increasingly dangerous (for the rest of us) blokes.

Somehow a numptie like me could not see that coming, all I could see back in the late 1990’s and early noughties was the excitement at being able to reach an audience without a sometimes annoying gatekeeper who intrinsically knew how the old system worked.

I clearly remember when the realisation struck that literally anyone could become a micro media mogul. It was intoxicating, anyone could be a publisher and all the talk was, everyone could have their own newspaper, magazine, radio show, TV channel.

What the whaaaa!!

I went to conferences about it in London, Los Angeles and Sydney, it all seemed so exciting, positive and creative. But my 20th century brain was still thinking in terms of exclusivity and gatekeepers and professional restricted access. I didn’t know what ‘everyone can become a media mogul’ meant.

That thinking came from 35 years working in old school linear TV, radio and publishing. This is where the C word raises it’s ugly little head.

Nothing was ever called content other that a cereal packet had a list of contents, that was the only place I’d really seen that word. We wrote books, magazine articles, poems, songs, we recorded radio shows, we made TV programs, never, not once, did anyone refer to any of this creativity as ‘content.’

That word emerged in the late 1990’s and was slapped onto our efforts by skinny young men in America and Estonia who could type and talk very fast and were as emotionally mature as a USB dongle.

Content was the stuff they needed to pad out the time between commercials which would make them staggering amounts of money. Numbers in the shape of dollars. Billions of them.

And what was better still, unlike the old days when a publisher, TV company or newspaper had to pay for ‘content,’ these scrawny young men worked out that people, (like me) would do it for free.

And we did. By the petabyte.

For balance of course, if they hadn’t created these systems, I, for one, would not be doing what I’m doing now.

I know this because I actually tried to deliver online video long before YouTube was launched in 2005. It was incredibly difficult.

In 1999 I was involved in setting up a company called BwebB. at the time there was a TV news station in the UK called BSkyB, part owned by News Corp, which is of course controlled by friend of the little man, purveyor of truth, Rupert Murdoch, (167 year old and now on his 92nd marriage)

BwebB was an absolute disaster from day 1. We had to upload video to our own servers and we had to pay for the bandwidth, just as everyone running a business at that time would have to.

Then, if people ever watched the super compressed, 4 to 5 minute clips we produced, they would download them using a dial up modem which would take around an hour, and watch them, and we had to pay for the production costs and the bandwidth to deliver them.

I once made the analogy that if BwebB had been a grocery store, we would spend money making it pleasant and stocking it with quality goods, a customer would enter, pick up a tin of beans, say ‘these look nice’ and we would then pay them to walk out of the shop with the beans. Not a recipe for a thriving long term business.

Obviously the idea was to sell advertising around the video clips, (again, this happened before people called what we made ‘content’) but because our top performing video had something like 820 downloads, strangely, advertisers weren’t interested.

A few years later two chaps called Chad Hurley and Steve Chen cracked the idea and created something that anyone could upload to, the entire ‘media landscape’ changed.

It was called YouTube.

I just checked some more numbers, around 3.7m new videos are uploaded to YouTube every day – that's around 271,330 hours of video. When you see numbers like that, it is a miracle that any episode of the Fully Charged Show gets more than 5 views.

Since then, many dozens of differing systems have developed allowing people to converse, inform, argue, share and indeed, ‘create content.’ All the while, inadvertently feeding trillions of dollars to a very small number of, it has to be said men in America.

And hats off to them, it was 99% men who came up with MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads and TikTok (okay, Chinese men). If there were any women involved in the early days of these companies, they have been brutally swept aside and we will never know about them.

Substack was started by Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi and Hamish McKenzie in Silicon Valley in 2017. They were partly funded by recent Trump devotee Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz. Lovely.

I don’t know and no longer care how benign, cruel, supportive or vile the people running Substack are, it’s too boring to follow the antics of incredibly rich people as they descend into the madness of reactionary American politics, but there is one number remaining that I want to mention.

This morning I heard a man called J D Vance, the potential future vice president of the USA, tell a charming anecdote about his wonderful, all American grandmother.

She passed away in 2005, and when he and his family cleared her house, they found 19 loaded handguns secreted at various points around the house. As Mr Vance imparted this bizarre story at the Republican convention, it got a huge positive response from an adoring audience.

This is days after the ex president was shot at, with a gun, and yet it’s perfectly fine to admire an elderly woman with 19 loaded firearms in her house. That little fact is so weird, frightening and insane that for people who do not live in America it’s now impossible to comprehend.

The fact that this is seen as a good thing by a certain section of American society crosses some psychological line into verifiable insanity for the vast majority of the global population. It makes me very sad for the Americans I know who would not think 19 loaded firearms hidden around your house is a good idea.

Maybe one thing will come out of what seems to be the very likely future for America. We might all want to turn down the media torrent coming out of the country. As English speakers, we are very exposed to this firehose of madness in the UK, and we all use American social media systems, and we are all influenced by the American way of thinking.

I am reminding myself, regardless of politics, just plain old geography, we are European, not American. It might benefit our sanity and economy to quietly turn in the other direction toward our slightly less insane nearer neighbours.