Robin Berjontweets archive

Thread · 9 tweets · 3 Sept 2020

Robin Berjon @robinberjon ·
Much like poultry farmers, publishers carry the investment risk but have to abide by standards set by platforms that will decide their success. This week it's AMP, Apple News Format, and FBIA; next week it's WebBundles. Now news are all important. Oh wait no, people connecting.
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Robin Berjon @robinberjon ·
When the rules change some will go under, the platforms stay. Remember "pivot to video"? Who took the fall? It's not a sustainable system for producers, but that's not what is being optimised for.
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Robin Berjon @robinberjon ·
I assume the people in agriculture megacorps have become cynical, but they didn't use to be. "Seeing Like A State" has good parts about the Cold War collaboration and mutual admiration between US large scale farming and Soviet collectivised farming. bookshop.org/books/seeing-l…
Robin Berjon @robinberjon ·
The idealistic engineers pitching us a perfect "marketplace of content" today remind me of Veblen's "Soviet of Technicians" - the same 100 years apart. They eagerly want freedom, not oppression. But oppression they will give because that's what scale does.
Robin Berjon @robinberjon ·

Replying to an earlier tweet of mine

But! On the off chance that it might happen, he concludes with details about how to organise this in a "MEMORANDUM ON A PRACTICABLE SOVIET OF TECHNICIANS". YMMV but IMHO totally worth reading a book just for that heading.
Robin Berjon @robinberjon ·
Why does scale do that? Because it cannot work without widespread legibility. In turn, legibility is never without footprint: it shapes the world, standardises it into the limited set of parts that engineered solutions can manipulate.
Robin Berjon @robinberjon ·
There's a whole book wanting to be written about high modernist parallels between the aspirations and methods such as those of Soviet Russia (without the clichés) and those of Big Tech. If in doubt, you haven't met the OKR economy!
Robin Berjon @robinberjon ·
Next time your OKR planning session feels a little overwhelming, come back to read this tweet and reassure yourself that your process, intricate as it may be, is only slightly more complex than its sovietic ancestor.
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Robin Berjon @robinberjon ·
At any rate, the parallels between how very disparate entities are managed by platforms aren't random. Just as we forgot happened with sincere hope more than once this past century: there is no project more totalitarian than the central organisation of the world's information.
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