Competition in the Digital Age

January 21, 2018January 21, 2018 tukaglobal498 Comments

How to tame the tech titans

The Economist, Jan. 18, 2018

The dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon is bad for consumers and competition [And suppliers.]

NOT long ago, being the boss of a big Western tech firm was a dream job. As the billions rolled in, so did the plaudits: Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others were making the world a better place. Today these companies are accused of being BAADD—big, anti-competitive, addictive and destructive to democracy. Regulators fine them, politicians grill them and one-time backers warn of their power to cause harm.

Much of this techlash is misguided. The presumption that big businesses must necessarily be wicked is plain wrong. Apple is to be admired as the world’s most valuable listed company for the simple reason that it makes things people want to buy, even while facing fierce competition. Many online services would be worse if their providers were smaller. Evidence for the link between smartphones and unhappiness is weak. Fake news is not only an online phenomenon.

But big tech platforms, particularly Facebook, Google, and Amazon, do indeed raise a worry about fair competition. That is partly because they often benefit from legal exemptions. Unlike publishers, Facebook and Google are rarely held responsible for what users do on them; and for years most American buyers on Amazon did not pay sales tax. Nor do the titans simply compete in a market. Increasingly, they are the market itself, providing the infrastructure (or “platforms”) for much of the digital economy. Many of their services appear to be free, but users “pay” for them by giving away their data. Powerful though they already are, their huge stockmarket valuations suggest that investors are counting on them to double or even triple in size in the next decade.

There is thus a justified fear that the tech titans will use their power to protect and extend their dominance, to the detriment of consumers (see article). The tricky task for policymakers is to restrain them without unduly stifling innovation. [Blogger note: Mostly they are interested in continuing to exploit their monopsony power over suppliers – and customers are valuable suppliers of free data.]

The platforms have become so dominant because they benefit from “network effects”. Size begets size: the more sellers Amazon, say, can attract, the more buyers will shop there, which attracts more sellers, and so on. By some estimates, Amazon captures over 40% of online shopping in America. With more than 2bn monthly users, Facebook holds sway over the media industry. Firms cannot do without Google, which in some countries processes more than 90% of web searches. Facebook and Google control two-thirds of America’s online ad revenues.

America’s trustbusters have given tech giants the benefit of the doubt. They look for consumer harm, which is hard to establish when prices are falling and services are “free”. The firms themselves stress that a giant-killing startup is just a click away and that they could be toppled by a new technology, such as the blockchain. Before Google and Facebook, Alta Vista and MySpace were the bee’s knees. Who remembers them?

However, the barriers to entry are rising. Facebook not only owns the world’s largest pool of personal data, but also its biggest “social graph”—the list of its members and how they are connected. Amazon has more pricing information than any other firm. Voice assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant, will give them even more control over how people experience the internet. China’s tech firms have the heft to compete but are not about to get unfettered access to Western consumers.

If this trend runs its course, consumers will suffer as the tech industry becomes less vibrant. Less money will go into startups, most good ideas will be bought up by the titans and, one way or another, the profits will be captured by the giants.

The early signs are already visible. The European Commission has accused Google of using control of Android, its mobile operating system, to give its own apps a leg up. Facebook keeps buying firms which could one day lure users away: first Instagram, then WhatsApp and most recently tbh, an app that lets teenagers send each other compliments anonymously. Although Amazon is still increasing competition in aggregate, as industries from groceries to television can attest, it can also spot rivals and squeeze them from the market.

The rivalry remedy

What to do? In the past, societies have tackled monopolies either by breaking them up, as with Standard Oil in 1911, or by regulating them as a public utility, as with AT&T in 1913. Today both those approaches have big drawbacks. The traditional tools of utilities regulation, such as price controls and profit caps, are hard to apply since most products are free and would come at a high price in foregone investment and innovation. Likewise, a full-scale break-up would cripple the platforms’ economies of scale, worsening the service they offer consumers. And even then, in all likelihood one of the Googlettes or Facebabies would eventually sweep all before it as the inexorable logic of network effects reasserted itself.

The lack of a simple solution deprives politicians of easy slogans but does not leave trustbusters impotent. Two broad changes of thinking would go a long way towards sensibly taming the titans. The first is to make better use of existing competition law. Trustbusters should scrutinize mergers to gauge whether a deal is likely to neutralize a potential long-term threat, even if the target is small at the time. Such scrutiny might have prevented Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and Google’s of Waze, which makes navigation software. To ensure that the platforms do not favor their own products, oversight groups could be set up to deliberate on complaints from rivals—a bit like the independent “technical committee” created by the antitrust case against Microsoft in 2001. Immunity to content liability must go, too.

Second, trustbusters need to think afresh about how tech markets work. A central insight, one increasingly discussed among economists and regulators, is that personal data are the currency in which customers actually buy services. [Yes.] Through that prism, the tech titans receive valuable information—on their users’ behavior, friends and purchasing habits—in return for their products. Just as America drew up sophisticated rules about intellectual property in the 19th century, so it needs a new set of laws to govern the ownership and exchange of data, with the aim of giving solid rights to individuals. [Exactly. Facebook is NOT free.]

In essence, this means giving people more control over their information. If a user so desires, key data should be made available in real time to other firms—as banks in Europe are now required to do with customers’ account information. Regulators could oblige platform firms to make anonymised bulk data available to competitors, in return for a fee, a bit like the compulsory licensing of a patent. Such data-sharing requirements could be calibrated to firms’ size: the bigger platforms are, the more they have to share. These mechanisms would turn data from something titans hoard, to suppress competition, into something users share, to foster innovation.

None of this will be simple, but it would tame the titans without wrecking the gains they have brought. Users would find it easier to switch between services. Upstart competitors would have access to some of the data that larger firms hold and thus be better equipped to grow to maturity without being gobbled up. And shareholders could no longer assume monopoly profits for decades to come.

Welcome to Web 3.0

The Genius? of Silicon Valley?

January 12, 2018January 10, 2018 tukaglobal580 Comments

Here’s a review of Franklin Foer’s new book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. What we’re seeing here is the slow breaking of the next wave of tech, from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, where the users take back control and are treated as more than mindless sources of data. It took a long time to transition the world out of feudalism and we’re still in the very early stages of throwing off the yolk of data exploitation and tyranny. Algorithms cannot guide humanity.

The genius and stupidity of Silicon Valley

theweek.com/articles/731764/genius-stupidity-silicon-valley

Knowledge is a tricky thing.

Acquiring and deploying it to change the world through technological innovations can inspire great confidence and self-certainty in the person who possesses the knowledge. And yet, the confidence and self-certainty is nearly always misplaced — a product of the knower presuming that his expert knowledge of one aspect of reality applies equally to others. That’s one powerful reason why myths about the place of knowledge in human life so often teach lessons about hubris and its dire social, cultural, and political consequences.

Franklin Foer’s important new book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, is best seen as a modern-day journalistic retelling of one of those old cautionary tales about human folly. Though he doesn’t describe his aim in quite this way, Foer sets out to expose the foolishness and arrogance that permeates the culture of Silicon Valley and that through its wondrous technological innovations threatens unintentionally to wreck civilizational havoc on us all.

It’s undeniable that Silicon Valley’s greatest innovators know an awful lot. Google is an incredibly powerful tool for organizing information — one to which no previous generation of human beings could have imagined having easy and free access, let alone devising from scratch, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin managed to do. The same goes for Facebook, which Mark Zuckerberg famously created in his Harvard dorm room and has become a global powerhouse in a little more than a decade, turning him into one of the world’s richest men and revolutionizing the way some two billion people around the world consume information and interact with each other.

That’s power. That’s knowledge.

But knowledge of what?

Mostly of how to program computers and deploy algorithms to sort through, organize, cluster, rank, and order vast quantities of data. In the case of Facebook, Zuckerberg obviously also understood something simple but important about how human beings might enjoy interacting online. That’s not nothing. Actually, it’s a lot. An enormous amount. But it’s not everything — or anything remotely close to what Silicon Valley’s greatest innovators think it is.

When it comes to human beings — what motivates them, how they interact socially, to what end they organize politically — figures like Page and Zuckerberg know very little. Almost nothing, in fact. And that ignorance has enormous consequences for us all.

You can see the terrible problems of this hubris in the enormously sweeping ambitions of the titans of technology. Page, for instance, seeks to achieve immortality.

Foer explains how Page absorbed ideas from countercultural guru Stewart Brand, futurist Ray Kurzweil, and others to devise a quasi-eschatological vision for Google as a laboratory for artificial intelligence that might one day make it possible for humanity to transcend human limitations altogether, eliminating scarcity, merging with machines, and finally triumphing over mortality itself. Foer traces the roots of this utopianism back to Descartes’ model of human subjectivity, which pictures a spiritual mind encased within and controlling an (in principle, separable) mechanical body. If this is an accurate representation of the mind’s relation to its bodily host, then why not seek to develop technology that would make it possible to deposit this mind, like so much software, into a much more durable and infinitely repairable and improvable computer? In the process, these devices would be transformed into what Kurzweil has dubbed “spiritual machines” that could, in principle, enable individuals to live on and preserve their identities forever.

The problem with such utopian visions and extravagant hopes is not that they will outstrip our technological prowess. For all I know, the company that almost instantly gathers and ranks information from billions of websites for roughly 40,000 searches every second will some day, perhaps soon, develop the technical capacity to transfer the content of a human mind into a computer network.

The problem with such a goal is that in succeeding it will inevitably fail. As anyone who reflects on the issue with any care, depth, and rigor comes to understand, the Cartesian vision of the mind is a fiction, a fairy tale. Our experience of being alive, of being-in-the-world, is thoroughly permeated and shaped by the sensations, needs, desires, and fears that come to us by the way of our bodies, just as our opinions of right and wrong, better and worse, noble and base, and just and unjust are formed by rudimentary reflections on our own good, which is always wrapped up with our perception of the good of our physical bodies.

Even if it were possible to transfer our minds — our memories, the content of our thoughts — into a machine, the indelible texture of conscious human experience would be flattened beyond recognition. Without a body and its needs, desires, vulnerabilities, and fear of injury and death, we would no longer experience a world of meaning, gravity, concern, and care — for ourselves or others. Which also means that Page’s own relentless drive to innovate technologically — which may well be the single attribute that most distinguishes him as an individual — would vanish without a trace the moment he realized his goal of using technological innovations to achieve immortality.

An immortal Larry Page would no longer be Larry Page.

Zuckerberg’s very different effort to overcome human limits displays a similar obliviousness to the character of human experience, in this case political life — and it ends with a similar paradox.

Rather than simply providing Facebook’s users with a platform for socializing and sharing photos, Zuckerberg’s company has developed intricate algorithms for distributing information in each user’s “news feed,” turning it into a “personalized newspaper,” with the content (including advertisements) precisely calibrated to his or her particular interests, tastes, opinions, and commitments. The idea was to build community and bring people together through the sharing and dissemination of information. The result has been close to the opposite.

As Facebook’s algorithms have become more sophisticated, they have gotten better and better at giving users information that resembles information they have previously liked or shared with their friends. That has produced an astonishing degree of reinforcement of pre-existing habits and opinions. If you’re a liberal, you’re now likely only to see liberal opinions on Facebook. If you’re conservative, you’ll only see conservative opinions. And if you’re inclined to give credence to conspiracy theories, you’ll see plenty of those.

And maybe not just if you favor conspiracy theories. As we’ve learned since the 2016 election, it’s possible for outside actors (like foreign intelligence services, for example) to game the system by promoting or sponsoring fake or inflammatory stories that get disseminated and promoted among like-minded or sympathetic segments of the electorate.

Facebook may be the most effective echo chamber ever devised, precisely because there’s potentially a personalized chamber for every single person on the planet.

What began with a hope of bringing the country and the world together has in a little over a decade become one of the most potent sources of division in a deeply divided time.

And on it goes, with each company and technology platform producing its own graveyards full of unintended consequences. Facebook disseminates journalism widely but ends up promoting vacuous and sometimes politically pernicious clickbait. Google works to make information (including the content of books) freely available to all but in the process dismantles the infrastructure that was constructed to make it possible for people to write for a living. Twitter gives a megaphone to everyone who opens an account but ends up amplifying the voice of a demagogue-charlatan above everyone else, helping to propel him all the way to the White House.

Foer ends his book on an optimistic note, offering practical suggestions for pushing back against the ideological and technological influence of Silicon Valley on our lives. Most of them are worthwhile. But the lesson I took from the book is that the challenge we face may defy any simple solution. It’s a product, after all, of the age-old human temptation toward arrogance or pride — only now inflated by the magnitude of our undeniable technological achievements. How difficult it must be for our techno-visionaries to accept that they know far less than they’d like to believe.

What’s An Artist To Do?

January 8, 2018January 4, 2018 tukaglobal572 Comments

Below is a recent op-ed printed in the Washington Post regarding the state of affairs for streaming music content. Mr. Fakir makes many legitimate points, as there’s no valid reason for streaming services not to have to pay royalties on music recorded before 1972. However, while copyright law is important for aging or retired artists who rely on performance royalties, the long-term problem for creative digital content is far more intractable.

The true problem for professional artists is that the supply of content has exploded while the price has collapsed. This is basic economics: when supply increases faster than demand, prices must fall. The explosion of supply is due to digital technology, which has caused production and distribution costs to plunge almost to zero. Now everybody and anybody can release music on Apple or publish books on Amazon or take thousands of digital photos on their phones.

So the real problem is too much content, reducing the market price while increasing the search costs for consumers. Plunging revenues have also hollowed out the promotion and marketing industries that serve creative content. So now artists not only create, they have to promote and distribute, paying with precious time or money for vendor services upfront. This is a Catch-22 for struggling artists – they have no money unless they sell product and yet can’t sell product unless they spend first on promotion. Meanwhile, digital distribution is monopolized by the big tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA).

Solutions?

First, technology offers the next disruption. Creative industries need on online clearinghouse for content that is curated by the network of creators, curators, and consumers. Think Facebook for content only.
Second, GAFA does not make the bulk of their revenues from content sales, but rather from the monetization of the data that flows through their networks. A network of creators, curators, and consumers need technology tools to build, manage, and monetize their personal peer networks. Blockchain technology offers the possibility of constructing such a distributed network for sharing content. Essentially, this is what the big tech servers do with our information data.

In sum, what we face is a globalized niche market where the main problem is less about price and getting paid and more about connecting creators with consumers to build new sources of value. (Note: even sharing free content creates data network value, like on Facebook.) New developments in technology can help us recapture and reinvigorate “the culture industry,” where we take back control of our creative content so we can reap the value we create and sustain a thriving creative ecosystem together.

We’re ripping off some of the best musicians of the last century. It needs to stop.

By Duke Fakir December 28, 2017

Duke Fakir is a founding member of the Four Tops and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

I’m a lucky man. I’ve been a performer and recording artist for most of my life. As a founding member of the Four Tops, I’ve been blessed to travel the world making music with my dearest friends, and we’ve seen our records hit the top of the charts. It’s a privilege I’ve never taken for granted, and I’m proud to say that our music has stood the test of time.

I’m also an activist who has spent years fighting to change laws that exploit artists. Our copyright system does not always provide fair compensation for performers and musicians, and I know that not everyone has been as fortunate as I have.

My fellow artists and I have argued for economic justice and fairness for so long, it can feel like the same empty answers keep coming around, and you never really get to anywhere new. And “the same old song” just isn’t good enough anymore.

That makes this moment critical. After years of “hurry up and wait” in Washington, powerful forces in Congress are attempting to fix one of the worst abuses faced by older artists: the “digital rip-off” of all recordings made before 1972.

Right now, digital radio stations such as SiriusXM and iHeartRadio pay royalties to artists for most of the music they play. It’s real money: Digital streams make up half of all music business revenue, pushing $4 billion a year. A lot of that money goes to independent artists, backup singers, session players, and sidemen — including a generation of lost greats who may have played a lot but didn’t get paid a lot. It’s money these folks count on to pay rent, buy groceries, cover medical bills and support their families.

But there’s a catch: Those same stations don’t pay royalties on music recorded before 1972 — not because it’s right or fair or the music is any less valuable. After all, we’re talking about some of the most iconic music ever recorded. But because federal copyright law doesn’t cover recorded music before 1972, some of the huge services that play music from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s have managed to get away with this inequity, daring anyone who disagrees to sue. Songwriters and music publishers may be getting paid — as well they should! — but the artists and the owners of the sound recordings are not.

This digital rip-off has been a disaster for many older artists, diverting the fruits of their labors — funds that should be their lifeline — to the balance sheets of some of the wealthiest companies in the world. Digital radio earns millions every year from the exploitation of pre-’72 music, from big band to Motown to the British Invasion. Yet artists who recorded those classics — many of whom are no longer able to tour — struggle for basic food, shelter, and medical care. It’s ridiculous, it’s unfair, and it’s about time we make it illegal.

Change is long overdue, but a chance to right this wrong is at hand. A bipartisan new bill called the Classics Act is moving quickly through Congress. The bill would require digital radio to treat all music the same, regardless of when it was recorded, ensuring that the same royalties are paid for older songs as for new material. It would open a world-changing lifeline for musicians from back in the day — bringing basic economic fairness to this key corner of the music world.

Don’t get me wrong — like most artists, I love radio, in all its forms. We’re proud that listeners want to hear our music, and we’re always happy to work with our colleagues to support their platforms, to help promote what they do and to connect with them and their music-loving customers. All we want is to be paid fairly.

We’ve been stuck for a long time in the fight for fairness for music creators. And the Classics Act isn’t the end of the road. We need to finally ensure the payment of a fair performance royalty for terrestrial radio and close the loopholes that allow big tech companies to collect huge profits while paying next to nothing for music.

A great piece of music should earn its fair share, whether it was recorded in 2002 or 1962. And right now, this is a problem that Congress has a chance to fix. In the meantime, I’ll keep singing. And I’ll keep fighting for what’s right. “I can’t help myself!”

Link to article…

The Death of Culture?

December 22, 2017December 22, 2017 tukaglobal691 Comments

Designing a Sustainable Creative Ecosystem

Too Much information = The Death of Culture?

The major creative industries of music, photography, print, and video have all been disrupted by digital technology. We know this. As Chris Anderson has argued in his book Free, the cost of digital content has been driven towards zero. How could this be a bad thing? Well, TMI (Too Much Information — in this case, Too Much Content) is the curse of the Digital Age. It means creators make no money and audiences can’t find quality content amidst all the noise.

The end result will be a staleness of content and stagnant creative markets, i.e., the slow death of culture. So, how did this happen and what do we do about it?

View the rest of the story on Medium.

Create – Share – Connect

November 6, 2017November 6, 2017 tukaglobal731 Comments

Below is a sample of Facebook comments for a FB community group called Musicians Unite. They posed the question above, “Why do you play music??” These are some of the hundreds of answers they received. It all pretty much boils down to the same thing.

Was there ever any doubt? tuka

Top Comments

52 Shares

‪Tracy A. Gaynor‪ It’s inside of me. A force of its own. I started playing piano at the age of five. It’s its own entity within me. Just as I breathe, need water and sustenance, I need music. I play music because it is my very soul.

‪Russell M Price‪ We musicians have a need to do it as well as a love for it. We don’t think regular people. Our outlook on the world is definitely different. Plus we look cool when we’re on stage. lol

‪John Payne‪ I do it because the constant melodies in my head have to get out somehow . Players know what I am talking about, so do their wives or girlfriends. besides what else could I do with four sets of drums.

‪Robert Bryant‪ Because I have to. ‪Not for money or applause or recognition or anything that. Just for the pure enjoyment I get out of playing and singing. If i couldn’t sing and play I don’t know what I would do.

‪Corey Shockey‪ I have to create. Music, my woodshop, or whatever. I just love the process of making something out of nothing. If others enjoy my work, great. If not, at least I enjoyed the process of making it happen.

‪Eric Hachey‪ I started loving music when i was 4 i then got a guitar and learned to play sing and write i found out that it brang people together and they danced sang and were happy i still play and I’m 60 next month music is magical life force

‪Graham Byrne‪ it keeps me sane,focused,gives me confidence,stops the bouts of depression,makes me smile,blanks out all the negative people/things in this world,and because my granddad and all the beautiful music that’s inspired me .. oh and because I’m not a great cook or cleaner ‪:)

‪Stanley E. Supranowicz Jr.‪ At first, I had a burning desire to just rock, honestly. Had no illusions of being a rock star. After a while, it became second nature, and I honestly feel I have something to say, and a unique perspective on some things.

‪Steve Barlow‪ My whole life I’ve loved music more than anything, it is the most powerfull force on Earth, and it subconsciously unites strangers.

‪Jonathan Baker‪ Often times I am able to shut out all my problems and escape into a world of sound waves where I can reflect on my life from another perspective. When I write a song it just comes out and I don’t understand it’s meaning until some time later when I play it back and I learn the meaning of my own song.

‪Ron Reed‪ Because I love to play. Started playing at eleven, in school. Trombone, tuba, baritone. After school I learned guitar, then drums. Now I play bass, have been for nearly thirty years. I couldn’t imagine life without playing.

‪Glenn Basil II‪ Becuz it was meant to be, long before I picked up an instrument I’d sing and write lyrics, it just evolved naturally, but then being able to play well enuff to entertain ppl is the real reward, its such a great feeling being able to help ppl forget about their problems and life and just Groove! With or without an audience I’ll always play, I have to. But I was born to play AND entertain!

‪Scott Cardone‪ So many reasons. Pure enjoyment, the once every ten years or so, I give myself the goosebumps , but most of all, it’s the great escape from the reality’s of Life…‪plus it’s an addiction

‪Mark Bertini‪ The story goes I was dancing in the crib before so could walk, whistling before I could talk. Music chose me I didn’t choose music. We have a symbiotic relationship and it runs in my blood and family history.

‪Gary Edmisten‪ Because I can. Plus it helps a great deal that I was born with it in my blood. I am a third generation musician and have always been so grateful to have come from a musically inclined family. Without music I probably would have never amounted to much of anything.

‪Theo Sanders‪ Because it brings joy to others (maybe some pain also when I play as I’m still learning) but it makes me happy also and you get to meet some awesome people. Most of my best friends were made through music. Also it reduces the risks of dementia as it is in my family history. It’s the only activity that requires you to use both sides of your brain.

‪Travis-John Wingert‪ Music is my attempt to externalize representations of my contradictionary life. Music is tactile, but also ephemeral, or abstract, and this allows it to tap straight into the paradox of our minds, foregoing cognitive dissonance. Music is the most influ…See More

‪Bryan Ferguson‪ I’ve asked myself this question so many times, but it’s a passion, if you get paid what you should, it’s great, but an appreciative audience gives you lots back as well, when you can connect with people through music, it is a beautiful thing….I’ve h…See More

‪Emilie Scanlon‪ Because at this point, I can’t live without it. It’s been the core of my life for so long. If I lost my ability to play and to sing, I would lose all reason to live.

‪Brian Lehnert‪ So I don’t kill myself also when your band clicks that shiver down your spine can’t help but smile and idiot kind of shit that’s the actual best feeling in the world I’ve never been happier than in those moments

‪Steve Bloom‪ This is why we use a subtle mantra in meditation. Sound is our deepest more easy path to the universal Unified Field of pure energy and consciousness.

‪Isaiah Scott‪ When I see everyone’s shining eyes and joy when I perform, whether classical or rock music, it gives me meaning (especially when I see little kids get sooo excited and sing and dance). I live to play music.

‪Mark Johns‪ You might as well ask why do I breathe because I have to music is ever much a part of my life as eating and breathing

‪Nosforotu Poet‪ No simple answer. The music is a driving force to compliment my poetry and art all are which come from the core of my soul. I need it just breathing in physical the arts are breathing for my soul.

‪Matthew Downey‪ There isn’t anything else worth doing. And if i didn’t i would probably perish. When i don’t play at least a little i feel physically ill.

‪Al Urezzio‪ At the age of 8 yrs old it created a feeling inside my heart & soul .. so now after 59 yrs , its a way of life .. never to change ..

‪Ernest McDaniel‪ That’s asking my why I breathe. Music is life. Without music there would be no life. Music is what connects you to your soul and gives you an outlet to express it. Music is the best therapy of all time.

‪Tom Maillie‪ My grandfather had a band and I have memories being mesmerized by watching them play as early as 5 or 6 years old. I knew then that playing music was something I wanted to do.

‪David Kaminester‪ Because I have a burning need to. It’s as simple as that. I have melodies in my head all the time. It would drive me crazy not to dispel that energy.

‪Chet Santia III‪ As a quasi introverted person playing music and performing are what helped me to connect the music became my voice, literally and figuratively! It gave me a voice!

‪Chris Williams‪ I do it because it’s a great way to express feelings and I’m just driven to the art of it and most recently I use it to express praise for God.

‪Ronnie Houston‪ It’s my drug of choice, my medicine. Thanking the creator endowing me with musical skills and creativity, and the ability to use them.

‪Devin Kimmel‪ Because it has become a part of me. It’s the most personal language to speak, and without it, I would have died a long time ago.

‪Claudine Langille‪ Music has always been the center of my universe, and I was really surprised when I got older and learned not everyone is wired that way!

‪André Cruz Glennhammar‪ I know it’s a very typical thing to say, but I didn’t choose to, music just opened my eyes to everything this world has to offer.

‪Ed McCoy‪ Because it’s fun! When you improve to the point where you can play most anything you hear, it’s really a blast!

‪Mark Alaniz‪ If you are given a gift,it should be shared.A song can take you places you might not otherwise be able to go to.

‪Jim Wilbanks‪ I play at church .it is my way of saying thank you to god for my life .family and so on .giving back to him .

‪Tammy Mitchell-Woods‪ I dont have a choice..i cant and wouldnt wnt to be able to separate from it…its a part of me…i HAVE to play

‪Ken Medlock‪ I guess God made me that way. Must be, because I have been involved for 40 + yrs. w/o any former music education ever.

‪Rob Gregson‪ For extra income but if i was doing it full time I’d be homeless an starving lol it’s fun tho an for my on needs

‪Jo Douglass‪ Play. = enjoyment/pleasure derived from a certain activity..why doesn’t everyone music the same way? we are all different notes on the same page? we could wank on for days! **guitarists joke

‪Jerome Blaha‪ …for fun and mental health–

‪Mike Dattilo‪ If I didn’t, I would be dead inside…

‪Isaiah Kavanamur‪ Anyone play music to lose themselves just for a bit

‪James Salisbury‪ Because I love it and because it’s my therapy lol

‪John Billigen‪ For life and to thank the Almighty for blessing me with this TALENT

‪Katie Kayhaos‪ That’s someone asking me why I breathe..

‪Courtney Daisey‪ Music is who I am. Without music, my soul would be an empty shell, a mere shadow of my true self.

‪Tim Starace‪ I do it for the free pitchers of diet coke…

‪Adam Jago‪ To Escape this cold cold world. And the monster inside me won’t let me think about anything else!

‪Marion Shepherd‪ Music is apart of me I can’t help myself.

‪Steven Militare‪ It is a large part of my soul.

‪Gary Fairbanks‪ It’s a part of who you are!

‪Don Kumpula‪ It’s who I am. To not play isnt even an option.

‪Josh Murrow‪ Simple. So I don’t hit people. I hit the skins. The best release. Both physically and mentally. Just the best release.

‪Jimmy Paul‪ I quote the great Tobiah Hale

‪“I’m just too dumb to quit!!”

‪Larry Johnson‪ Because one day I’ll be a rock star

‪Randall Wilson‪ Because it was bred in my blood !!!!!!

‪Dellwood Washington‪ Music is a part of my life that came with me when I came in this world

‪Jesse Smith‪ Because God gave me the talent to do so.

‪Alberto Pabon‪ Cause the Lord blessed me to do so. I owe it all to him.

‪Hideaki Yamakado‪ Because When I play music, I feel happy. Music makes my life better.

‪Kearon Andrew O’Brien‪ Love the sound of guitar. When l play it makes me feel famous. lol ‪Music is fun

‪Mike Ceely‪ music soothes the savage beast in me .it is the beat a my life

‪DScott Lloyd‪ It’s when I feel the most…. myself. …if that makes sense.

‪Rick Williamson‪ It’s instant gratification and allows me to leave the ground behind.

‪Dalton Mitchell‪ To let out the mean shit talking , anti-establishment but positive empath within.

‪Tom Humpston‪ Because I can’t NOT play music. It’s as much a part of me as breathing.

‪Thomas Hopper‪ I have no idea, I just do.

‪Charles Buie‪ Can’t help it. It’s inside me and wants to come out.

‪Rick Huff‪ I was born with that stuff. Can’t explain it. Just came naturally

‪William Graham Harper‪ To pass on a little love to my fellow man !!!

‪Peter S. Sportino‪ I love it! That it in a nutshell. There is no complicated explaination. That’s it!

‪James Keith Webb‪ That easy I love music it moves my soul!!!!!

…Read the book and harness the power!

Big Tech Gains at Our Expense?

October 30, 2017October 26, 2017 tukaglobal573 Comments

Reprinted in part from The Financial Times:

Big Tech makes vast gains at our expense

Data-driven companies have a licence to print money, with few restrictions

SEPTEMBER 17, 2017 by Rana Foroohar

Pressure has been growing in the past few weeks for politicians and regulators to clamp down on the monopoly power of Big Tech. In a speech given in Washington DC on September 12, Maureen Ohlhausen, the acting chair of the Federal Trade Commission in the US, tried to pour cold water on the idea. “Given the clear consumer benefits of technology-driven innovation,” she said. “I am concerned about the push to adopt an approach that will disregard consumer benefits in the pursuit of other, perhaps even conflicting, goals.”

Her words echo US antitrust policy of the past 40 years: if companies bring down prices for consumers, they can be as big and as powerful, economically and politically, as they want to be. This hugely favours companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, which offer up services and products, from search results to self-publishing platforms, that are not just cheap, but free.

Yet Ms Ohlhausen is overlooking a key point: free is not free when you consider that we are not paying for these services in dollars, but in data, including everything from our credit card numbers to shopping records, to political choices and medical histories. How valuable is that personal data?

It is a question of growing interest to everyone from economists to artists. For example, at Datenmarkt, an art installation cum grocery store set up in Hamburg in 2014, a can of fruit sold for five Facebook photos; a pack of toast for eight “likes” and so on.

The bottom line is that it is almost impossible to put an exact price on personal data, in part because people have widely varying behaviours and ideas about how likely they are to part with it, depending on how offers are posed. In one recent study, when consumers were asked straight out whether they would consent to being tracked by a brand name digital media firm in exchange for being targeted with more “useful” advertising, four-fifths said no. Yet another study published this year by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University shows how pathetically little incentive is required to convince people to give up their entire email contact list. Students in the study were far more likely to do it if offered a free pizza.

One might argue that this is simply the market working as it should. Consumers were given a choice, and they made it. And whether or not it was a bad one is not for us to judge.

But as the latter study also showed, companies can nudge users to part with data more freely by telling them it will be protected by technology designed to “keep the prying eyes of everyone from governments to internet service providers . . . from seeing the content of messages”. In fact, the encryption technology in question could not guarantee this.

The bottom line is that big data tilts the playing field decisively in favour of the largest digital players themselves. They can extract information and plant suggestions there that will lead us to entirely different decisions, which results in ever more profit for them.

Not only is that too much power for any one company to have, it is anti-competitive and market-distorting in the sense that the basic rules of capitalism as we know it are being overturned. There is no equal access to market information in this scenario. There is certainly no price transparency.

The personal data we give away so freely are being lavishly monetized by the richest companies on the planet (Facebook’s second-quarter operating margin, for example, was 47.2 per cent). They get their raw material (our data) more or less for free, then charge retailers and advertisers for it, who then pass those costs on to us in one form or another — a dollar more for that glass of wine at the bistro you found via a search, say. They have a licence to print money, without many of the restrictions, in terms of all sorts of corporate liability, that other industries have to grapple with.

These companies are not so much innovators as “attention merchants”

These companies are not so much innovators as “attention merchants”, to borrow a phrase from Columbia University law school professor Tim Wu. Economists have yet to put good figures on their net effect on productivity and gross domestic product growth. Surely it is high. Yet any tally would also have to include the competition costs as these firms devour competitors and reshape the 21st-century economy to suit themselves.

Whatever the FTC might say now, there are a growing number of legal cases that could change the ground rules for Big Tech. While American antitrust law has been based on very literal interpretations of the 1890 Sherman Act, lawmakers in Europe take a broader approach. They are trying to gauge how multiple players in the economic ecosystem are being affected by the digital giants.

I am beginning to wonder if we should not all have a more explicit right not only to control how our data are used, but to any economic value created from them.

When wealth lives mainly in intellectual property, it is hard to imagine how else the maths will work. We are living in a brave new world, with an entirely new currency. It will require creative thinking — economically, legally and politically — to ensure it does not become a winner-takes-all society.

Blogger Comment:
Data has become one of the primary economic resources of the Information Age. Data is analogous to land during the feudal age; energy, labor and natural resources in the industrial age, and human and financial capital in the post-industrial age. Giving away one’s data is akin to share-cropping and indentured servitude, when instead we should be homesteading and receiving the full value of our personal participation in the network.

Streaming Content and Trickling $$$

October 28, 2017October 26, 2017 tukaglobal555 Comments

How Much Does YouTube Pay? We Asked Nicki Jaine of Revue Noir.

Nicki Jaine of Revue Noir

My Song Got 1.254 Million Views on YouTube. I Got Paid $42.56 [Link]

How much does YouTube really pay? A top executive at the company claims a $3 CPM. But most of the royalty payments shared with Digital Music News are a tiny fraction of that.

We want to believe YouTube executive Lyor Cohen when he says YouTube pays a $3 CPM to artists. The only problem is that there’s zero evidence to support his claims.

And lots of evidence that artists are earning an infinitesimal fraction of that amount.

The latest proof comes from Nicki Jaine, one half of the duo Revue Noir. That group is signed to Projekt, who shared the royalty breakdown with Digital Music News.

(Quick aside: in online advertising land, ‘CPM’ stands for ‘cost per thousand’. It’s a calculation of how much gets paid for every 1,000 views. So, a ‘$3 CPM’ means you get paid $3 every 1,000 plays. That is, assuming those 1,000 plays had ads on them, which is another story entirely.)

Here’s a quick snapshot of those royalty payments from various streaming services. Keep in mind that these copyrights are 100% controlled, meaning that all publishing and all recording royalties are reflected in this breakdown.

As you can see, a lion’s share of Revue Noir’s payments are coming from free, ad-supported YouTube plays.

Despite 1,254,626 streams on the free platform, Revue Noir only earned $42.56.

Other streaming platforms are clearly paying better, but this group’s largest audience is on YouTube. Strangely, YouTube Red’s payments are far higher, but barely anyone is paying for Red. (The premium service was initially called ‘Music Key,’ and apparently not updated in this royalty statement).

Other platforms like Rhapsody, Tidal, and Spotify pay far better. But the group hasn’t been able to secure favorable playlist inclusion or amass a serious audience on those platforms. At least not yet. So it basically sucks to be them right now.

As a result, the group earned about $130 in total from nearly 1.3 million streaming plays.

In terms of the YouTube CPM calculation, that boils down to a 3.34 cent CPM. Which is about 1/88th the $3 CPM claimed by executives like Lyor Cohen.

Projekt CEO Sam Rosenthal is obviously disappointed with this result. “Spotify has 1.3% of the plays of YouTube, and yet it generates 40% more money,” Rosenthal told DMN.

“Well — that’s shitty!”

Rosenthal was also careful to clarify that this is a 100% copyright-owned composition. Meaning, all the revenues are reflected in this statement.

“And because somebody will say, ‘Oh, that’s because the label is screwing the artist out of their fair share’:

(1) I am the label
(2) The numbers above are the raw data from my digital distributor, before anyone takes their cut!”

The sad payout is even worse than a detailed breakdown we received in August. That YouTube statement showed an artist making 1/50th the rate claimed by YouTube and Cohen.

All of which is seriously eroding the credibility of executives like Cohen, and YouTube more broadly.

Unsurprisingly, the music industry is strategizing ways to minimize YouTube’s power over artists.

Just recently, Republic Records-signed rapper Post Malone decided to withhold his latest single from the video platform. Instead, Malone uploaded a looping chorus of his track ‘rockstar,’ while directing fans to check out the full song on other platforms.

Malone’s little idea worked. So far, the song has more than 50 million plays on YouTube — and more than 150 million on Spotify. Other platforms like Apple Music were also prominently featured as redirect options, leading to millions in diverted royalties.

Post Malone is easily one of the biggest rappers in the world right now. That makes this a noteworthy experiment, and one that could start a trend among other artists eager to divert fans to better-paying platforms.

Separately, a number of companies are also assisting artists to realize revenues elsewhere. That includes upstarts like Flattr, Songtradr, and Patreon, all of whom are focusing on dramatically improving artist incomes.

[Blogger’s Note: The exact same thing is happening with Kindle authors on Amazon who enroll their ebooks in the Kindle Online Lending Library. Subscriptions accumulate to Amazon, royalties trickle to authors.]

Breaking Up Big Tech

October 26, 2017October 26, 2017 tukaglobal712 Comments

An interesting piece reprinted from this week’s Barron’s. I think what we discover in reviewing the history of technology is that old technology gets disrupted by newer, better technology. I suspect this is what will disrupt the tech oligarchies built up over the past two decades. Not too long ago, the sector was dominated by IBM, HP, and AOL.

By TIERNAN RAY

October 21, 2017

Facebook, Amazon.com, and Alphabet deserve a lot of the credit for last week’s record stock market highs. The three tech titans are among the biggest overall contributors, kicking in two percentage points of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index’s 16% gain in 2017 and nearly five points of its 44% gain over the past three years. As they go, so goes the market: It’s estimated that the S&P moves a half a point for every $10 move in Amazon’s $1,000 share price.

Whether the three can continue to have such a positive effect on the stock market will depend on how they respond to U.S. and European regulators, who are starting to swing a heavier hammer to challenge their dominance. Alphabet’s (ticker: GOOGL) Google, for instance, holds 90% of Europe’s search and mobile operating systems markets, which has drawn the scrutiny of the European Commission. This and inquiries from the U.S.’s Federal Trade Commission have prompted speculation about the breakup of these companies. Former Google Ventures CEO Bill Maris, who now runs venture-capital firm Section 32, told a Wall Street Journal tech conference last week: “It wouldn’t surprise me if the sun is setting on the golden age of Silicon Valley.” He added that he also wouldn’t be shocked if regulators tried to break up companies like Google or Facebook because they have more command of their markets than AT&T (T) did in its heyday.

More than antitrust issues are in play. The huge amounts of personal data that Google, Facebook (FB), and Amazon (AMZN) are amassing is just as troubling to some. Facebook, for one, has been sued in Europe over its transfer of information about users from Europe to the U.S. A case heading for the U.S. Supreme Court could also have significant ramifications. Microsoft (MSFT) is being sued by the U.S. government for refusing to honor a warrant served to it to reveal a customer’s emails. At issue is whether a U.S. company must turn over data even when that data, as in Microsoft’s case, are stored on servers abroad.

Last week Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) joined two Democratic senators to co-sponsor a bill that would force Facebook, Google, and other internet providers to disclose who’s buying political ads on their sites, following the recent disclosures that Russians had purchased ads to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Of course, Facebook, Amazon, and Google owe most of their stock-market leadership to their ability to create and supply digital gadgets and services—everything from Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant to Google’s Android software, the top choice in mobile phones. But the shifts in political and government sentiment have stirred memories of not just AT&T, but IBM (IBM) and Microsoft. Both went through years of antitrust lawsuits that dragged down their stock prices and distracted management. Neither the companies nor their shares recovered quickly, as the nearby charts suggest.

All this has started to catch Wall Street’s attention. The European Commission, under competition watchdog Margrethe Vestager, fined Google 2.4 billion euros ($2.8 billion) on allegations that it gives more prominent placement in search results to its own “comparison shopping” listings versus listings from rival services. The commission alleged Google was manipulating the algorithms used to construct search results. More worrying was an EC case brought against Google in 2015, with formal charges lodged against it in spring 2016. The EC asserted that the company has abused its near-monopoly in both search and mobile operating systems by requiring gadget makers who license Android to install Google’s search bar as their default search mechanism on their devices.

“Of all the cases being brought, this is the one that most stands out as a concern, and it has made us less constructive on Alphabet” as a stock, says RBC Capital internet analyst Mark Mahaney, using Wall Street’s euphemism for being worried.

TAKEN TOGETHER, THESE challenges threaten the stock valuations of the group. To get an idea of the worst-case scenario, take a look at two of tech’s dominant players from previous eras: IBM and Microsoft.

The Department of Justice sued IBM in 1969 under the Sherman Antitrust Act, accusing the company of trying to monopolize the computer business, specifically by abusing its control of disk drives for mainframes. That action ended with the DoJ withdrawing its claims, but it tied up IBM and its management for years. From the time of the suit in January 1969, when the company boasted the largest market value in the S&P 500, till the day it announced it was backing off in January 1982, IBM stock declined 9.3%, versus a 14% gain in the S&P 500. Worse, IBM emerged from the suit in a weakened state to try to lead the personal computer revolution. Ultimately, it lost its dominant tech position to Microsoft, Compaq, and Apple (AAPL). A winning government case isn’t necessary to affect a stock’s price.

Microsoft’s collision with the government occurred in 1998, when the DOJ sued it on antitrust grounds, accusing Microsoft of abusing its monopoly in PC operating systems by “tying” its Internet Explorer browser to Windows. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Franklin Fisher, the chief economic witness for the government, showed that Microsoft was giving away its Web browser to destroy a competitor, Netscape, which threatened Windows’ dominance. In Microsoft CEO Bill Gates’ famous phrase, the software giant was “cutting off [Netscape’s] oxygen.”

The judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, ordered a breakup of Microsoft, but that was rejected by an appeals court, in part because it decided Jackson had violated ethics rules by meeting with reporters to discuss the case. The FTC settled with Microsoft in November 2001. Even though the company avoided the worst fate—a breakup—in the subsequent nearly 13 years, until the appointment of Satya Nadella as CEO, the stock rose a meager 18%, versus 62% for the S&P 500. Microsoft competitors Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP) saw their shares nearly triple in the same period.

Like IBM, Microsoft emerged from the government suit just as the tech world was changing. Google was founded the year of the suit, and its Gmail and Android would, along with Apple’s iPhone—which debuted six years after the settlement—demolish the importance of the PC and the Windows operating system.

Amazon, Facebook, and Google all benefit from the same sort of network effects that snagged Microsoft. The more people use Facebook, the more others feel they must use it, in a self-perpetuating fashion. Ditto for advertising on Google or selling goods on Amazon. Wall Street and investors may love this virtuous cycle, or, as it’s commonly known, the “flywheel” that keeps expanding their businesses.

But others, citing Fisher’s work, see exploitation and unfair leverage. They can argue that Amazon sells its Echo home speaker at roughly break-even prices to bring in more shoppers. It’s conceivable such leverage could be interpreted by regulators as predatory. Another example is Amazon’s bundling of its Amazon Prime membership, which offers free shipping and streaming videos, below Amazon’s cost to provide it. Google’s use of Android to maintain its search engine as pre-eminent on mobile devices has been likened to the kind of “tying” that Microsoft tried with Internet Explorer.

FOR NOW, THE BIGGEST TECH companies don’t face an immediate threat of being broken up. But just the possibility creates a risk factor in the stocks. “We expect increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and EU, which could create an overhang which hinders prospects for further multiple expansion for these companies,” wrote Michael Nathanson, an analyst at MoffettNathanson who covers Alphabet and Facebook.

A regulatory quagmire lasting several years would not just hold back the stocks’ multiple expansion but could substantially contract them, as previous challenges did to Microsoft and IBM. Microsoft’s forward price/earnings multiple declined from 27 to 14 times between late 2001 and 2014, while IBM’s trailing P/E declined from 53 to 10 times from 1969 to 1982.

The current tech giants already sport expensive prices. At 124 times next year’s projected earnings, Amazon’s stock has plenty of room for multiple compression, as they say. But even Alphabet and Facebook, trading at 25 and 27 times, respectively, are up slightly from their year-ago multiples of 20 times and 26 times.

Like IBM and Microsoft, the latest titans run the risk of missing the next big thing. Tim O’Reilly, chief executive of O’Reilly Media, an influential publisher and futurist who has had many conversations with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, thinks that will be the symbiosis of human and machine. Human abilities will be amplified by machines as society comes to better understand how data affect the real world. From browsers, it’s already progressed to ride-sharing services from Uber Technologies and Lyft, which in the future will pilot people anywhere without a driver. Likewise, agribusiness giant Monsanto (MON) is looking at how weather data can be used to control robotic farm equipment, putting it on a collision course with its traditional partner, Deere (DE). Will Facebook, Amazon, and Google, possibly preoccupied by government inquiries, miss the boat?

Given tech’s enormous clout in the markets, even a relatively small decline would affect millions of investors. The stocks dominate both active portfolios and passive ones like exchange-traded funds Techology Select Sector SPDR (XLK), which includes Facebook and Google, or Consumer Discretionary Select Sector SPDR (XLY), which includes Amazon. Howard Silverblatt of S&P Dow Jones Indices notes that Apple, which hasn’t been a focus of the government inquiries, is the biggest component of the market-weighted S&P 500, at 7.8%. Facebook is No. 2, at 4.7%, Amazon is fourth at 3.4%, and Alphabet’s A and C classes of stock combined rank as fifth and sixth, with a combined 4%.

CAN FACEBOOK, GOOGLE, and Amazon avoid much tighter regulation or a breakup? Yes, but they’re going to need to change their ways. For every mea culpa from Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg about Russian advertising in the 2016 presidential election, there seems to be at least one utterly tone-deaf incident. That would include her boss Mark Zuckerberg’s recent demonstration of his firm’s new virtual-reality gadget by pretending to tour the devastation of Puerto Rico, a move that seemed especially insensitive. Other public-relations low points include Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s parties in Las Vegas and sexist emails circulating at Google about female engineers.

The companies, instead, could be helping the public understand the complexity of their businesses and why things like leveraging a logistics business to lure third-party sellers is justifiable.

“We are at this moment in time, this Facebook moment, when everybody’s talking about these things, and it could be a teachable moment,” says O’Reilly. He thinks the companies need to communicate the economic inputs and outputs of the internet business model, things such as stock options that are a super-currency with which they have financial leverage, but also how many ancillary jobs they create by enabling commerce. [Blogger’s note: I seriously doubt they are going to successfully PR their way to public acceptance of monopoly economic power.]

The internet giants could help in shaping enlightened reforms, suggests O’Reilly. New financial statements could be formulated with the help of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, he says, and stock compensation, one of the worst aspects of Silicon Valley, could be reformed. “They’re aware, but they just don’t get” the need for dialogue with the public, O’Reilly says. “It’s like someone who knows they should quit smoking, but they just don’t.”

The stakes are large, says O’Reilly. “I think there’s huge risk in America that we are going to create a regulatory burden that is going to mean that our companies are less competitive in many markets,” he says.

IF THESE GIANTS GET SIDESWIPED, it could be because of the fatal flaw in large tech companies that’s often drawn social ire and regulation—the will to exploit their dominance. “The biggest thing they’re vulnerable to is that they work too hard to protect their existing businesses,” says O’Reilly. [It’s the capitalist survival instinct, and no company willingly falls on their sword for principles of fairness.]

“That’s always where companies get it wrong—Microsoft got it wrong, IBM before them got it wrong—they basically did things to extract money from customers rather than benefit customers,” he says. How the current tech titans meet this challenge likely will determine how shareholders fare as well. [That would be the far-sighted strategy. Web 3.0 will probably force it upon them. The Golden Rule stated: “Technology disrupts technology.”]

The Logic of tuka

October 23, 2017October 23, 2017 tukaglobal313 Comments

Many people, introduced to the concept developed here under the tuka ecosystem model, have asked, “So, what makes tuka different?”

Cribbing from Socrates, we would answer that question by posing two of our own:

Why do people use the Internet?

I believe we can come up with a lot of different reasons people have embraced the Internet, despite the fact that sitting in front of a computer screen or thumbing a smartphone for hours is bad for the eyes, the hands, the posture and the back! But, one gains access to the world’s information at one’s finger-tips. We can be much more efficient and productive by having access to more information at much lower cost than in the past.

But those reasons just beg the question as to why having access to more and more information is important. Well, yes, information can be valuable, especially if it makes us more productive with our scarce resources of time and energy. In other words, information is valuable because informed knowledge empowers us to do more of the things we want to do, at less cost.

So, what is it we want to do? [That’s really a rhetorical question because there are literarily billions of valid answers.]

Let’s move on to question #2 and maybe it will become clear what we’re getting at.

2. Why do so many people use Facebook?

I think the answers to this question are quite different from the answers to the previous question. I doubt Facebook makes anybody more productive, unless one is running viral ad campaigns. Facebook and its fellow social media platforms actually seem to be the biggest time-wasters since the advent of the Internet! But apparently users are not only attracted to social media, they become addicted to it. How and why?

I believe the answer is found in psychology and the human need to be connected to others. As Aristotle wrote, “Man is a social animal,” (and woman perhaps even more so?). And we connect by sharing information with each other that ranges from silly gossip to important and relevant knowledge (like how to survive a natural disaster).

And the connection is as, if not more, important as the information being shared. This is a key insight into information technology because it tells us what’s really going on behind all this BIG DATA.

If we work backward from this goal of connection we see that connection is driven by the human instinct to connect by sharing, which is rooted in some initial step to create whatever it is we wish to share. Connection <- Sharing <- Creating. Here we have reverse engineered the internal logic of the tuka creative social media ecosystem: Create -> Share -> Connect, which repeats in an endless feedback loop.

So, the point of this post is to show that tuka is not really about what a new technology tool can do for us, but about what we can do with technology to be more like who we really are.