Age of Oligopoly
1.4
The next three weeks of arachne will come out on Mondays and Tuesdays instead of Sundays. Sorry sorry. Lot’s of travel on the books. Today there’s more oligopoly.
🌟 Feature
So last week I talked a little bit about oligopoly. As a quick reminder, oligopoly is a circumstance similar to monopoly, except instead of just one company controlling a market or industry, it’s just a handful of them.
At first glance, oligopoly seems like competition. It seems like a circumstance that encourages newcomers and allows workers to earn what they are truly worth by playing a so called free market of compensation. But here are some examples of oligopolies and the negative effects they have on the tech and entertainment fields.
Telecom: When you moved into your current place you likely had no option for which ISP you wanted to use. Comcast, Verizon, Spectrum or whatever, you probably only had one or two choices. Thanks to the Telecom Act of 1996, the large providers have been able to chop and slice the American broadband map, making deals and trading blocks of city streets for exclusivity. Why is it bad? When one provider has exclusivity to an area or building, they can set the prices, no matter how good or bad the internet they provide is. The oligopoly in this case is deliberate: the companies literally decided with each other who gets exclusivity where.
Music Streaming: Spotify and Apple Music. There are upstream problems with the music industry that hurt the artists themselves, but let’s just focus on the consumer problems. Without meaningful upstart competition, these two players don’t actually have to try that hard to retain customers. Their apps can suck, and they both do.
Mobile Software: Apple and Google are the gatekeepers of anything that happens on a mobile device in this country. They have claimed that they tightly control what’s on the App Store or Play Store for security reasons, and this is fair and true. Their requirements have indeed made apps more secure and private. At the same time, though, they possess a visibility into the success of third party apps that allows them to copy and corner them out of the market. Plus, the fees they charge can skim useful profits off the top of upstart apps, making the cost of entry high for newcomers.
Last one. Broadway: Three for-profit companies control 31 of the 41 Broadway theaters (and 8 of the 10 largest). The Schubert Organization, the Nederlander Organization, and Jujamcyn. Often, criticism is lobbied at producers of Broadway shows for a lack of creativity or innovation in commercial theater. Jukebox musicals, revivals, etc. But it should be noted that the price that theater owners place on using their space is unbelievably high. And since there are limited players in the market, any sort of business model innovation is impossible.
I say all of this to draw your attention to the breadth of industries for which this structure is the case. And it just continues, even beyond the entertainment and tech fields: airplane manufacturing, airlines, home improvement retailers, soft drinks. Since Reagan era dismantlement of American anti-trust regulation, we’ve been on this long march of consolidation and anti-competition.
I know I said I’d try to keep these things shorter. But I wanted to use this newsletter in general to consolidate the scale of the problem facing entertainment, tech, and just about every other sector of the economy. Soon, I’ll talk more about what we can do about it. And by “we,” I mean the United States federal government.
📚 Reading list
Watched an excellent video essay about the emergence of meta modernism in film. It touches on how technology brought us modernism, post modernism, and now meta modernism in this very clear way. Here’s the link:
⚡️ Lightning
The FTC failed to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision.
SAG-AFTRA joined the strike. I have a feeling this will turbo charge public sentiment against the AMPTP (the organization of oligopolistic entertainment companies against whom the strike is being levied).
Fran Drescher is absolutely killing it.
We need a new American labor movement.
Aspartame is basically still okay to drink, everyone.
I’ve been trying out the public beta for iOS 17. So far I’m sorta meh about it.
📕 Glossary
The Telecommunications Act of 1996
A landmark bill that sought to increase competition while deregulating the industry. It didn’t totally work. It also did some good things. It improved and codified accessibility on the internet and created Section 230, the provision that essentially allows for things like Wikipedia and YouTube to exist
☎️ Answers
Got an interesting question this week:
How do they create those AI voices I see on TikTok?
So there’s been this trend on TikTok of “AI covers,” where people essentially load the voice of one singer into the song of another. You also may have seen those videos of Obama, Biden, and Trump playing Minecraft.
To understand how they work, here is a basic breakdown of how AI/ML works:
Large corpus of data gets fed into a special software with specific parameters and generates an output based on a prompt. Think about it in human terms. Your brain needs to learn what a chair is, it spends a huge amount of time observing chairs of all shapes and sizes, and then when presented with a new thing that might be a chair, your brain goes “Yes, a chair” or “No, not a chair.” Or, you could be asked to make a chair. And given the right material you could do it.
In the case of these AI voices, actual recordings of the speech or singing of a particular person (readily accessible in the case of notable public figures) get fed into the machine, it learns the cadence, vocabulary, style, tone, diction, etc. of the individual, and then given a new prompt it can recreate that voice. It is, essentially, exactly how impressionists work. Data → Model → Re-creation of Model.
There’s a lot of dicey stuff here, including consent. Be careful about where you supply your voice and speech data. Some very good versions of this software only require a couple minutes of your voice to recreate it.
That’s all for this week. Next time you hear from me I will have seen Beyoncé. I’m not sure I will be alive.