Les Idées Se Répandent

A French writer introduces the concepts of convergence and corporate cancer to the francophonic world.

“The highest form of the art of war is not to fight but to corrupt everything of value in your enemy’s country until the perception of your enemy is so distorted that he doesn’t even perceive you as an enemy anymore.” – Yuri Bezmenov

In April 2023, the famous American beer brand “Bud Light”, owned by the Anheuser Busch Inbev group, launched an advertising campaign featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. A week later, the company’s market capitalization was down $6 billion as sales plummeted. Between 2005 and 2016, NASCAR, the most popular motor sport in the United States had seen an equally dramatic decline in its spectators after having taken the turn of “inclusiveness”, its president Mike Helton going so far as to declare in 2006 that: “we are convinced that the redneck heritage of the southern United States on which this sport was based no longer exists. But we also realize that we have to make an effort to help other people understand it.”

In his book Corporate Cancer published in 2019, author and editor Vox Day revealed the factors that lead successful, well-established and sometimes growing companies to scuttle themselves by launching communication campaigns. disastrous and alienating their most loyal customers. Day’s explanation of this phenomenon is the gradual takeover and destruction of a company by progressive ideology, a process he called “convergence.” According to Day, the progression of this ideology within a company can be compared to a cancer whose evolution would correspond to the following phases…

This analysis grid helps to understand why the spread of “progressivism” within a company quickly leads to its ruin. In his book, Day gives very concrete examples of the explosion of costs induced by the convergence of a company and estimates that once the process has started the loss of turnover can reach up to 20% in the space of a year. Day nevertheless takes pains to point out that “light” signs of convergence should not lead to overreaction from management and that there is a real difference between a converged company and a mere marketing rhetoric aimed at satisfy a specific market segment.

It is worth pointing out that, in theory, a market economy should lead to the rapid elimination of a company that is dysfunctional or unable to meet the demands of its customers. However, as the author of “Corporate Cancer” rightly points out, the pursuit of these disastrous strategies or positions both for the image of companies and for their balance sheets prove that what is at stake here goes beyond the simple question economy and demonstrates the reality of a system whose avowed objective is now to “change society and change mentalities”.

In the age of Clown World, convergence is one of the most important concepts for any individual with any responsibility in an organization to understand. Without it, the individual finds himself operating in the dark while beset by invisible enemies whose actions appear insensible and whose motivations he cannot possibly understand.

And so, it’s good to see that people from other cultures are beginning to grasp it, because their societies are under assault too, as the chief aim of Clown World is to converge the entire planet.

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They May Not Be There

Amazon follows up its closure of Book Depository by announcing that it is shutting down Digital Photography Review as well. Given the observable pattern here, it’s really not looking good for GoodReads.

The demise of Digital Photography Review: I have written this column for over 20 continuous years and this is the saddest news I have ever had to report. Digital Photography Review is closing down and as of April 10, 2023 the site will be locked and no new content will be added. More ominously, the site states “The site will be available in read-only mode for a limited period afterwards.” That is a businesslike way of saying the site and all its content will soon disappear for good.

Amazon is responsible for this. They purchased the site in 2007 and now that it does not fit in their business plans, they are going to erase it. This is despicable given the cost of keeping the site available in static form is infinitesimal to a company Amazon’s size.

Surely Amazon can be a good corporate citizen and keep the site up in read-only mode, for the good of everyone? It would be wonderful if a white knight came in and saved DPReview, but that is looking less and less likely. Online commentators are calling the upcoming site deletion “cultural vandalism” and “book burning.” I am with them and in terms of book burning, in the realm of photography it is like burning The Library of Alexandria. The significance of dpreview.com to the industry and photographers everywhere cannot be overstated. There are in-depth camera reviews going back to 1998 along with a comparator that allows you to compare test scene images from almost every camera they have ever tested. There are also forums with sample images and discussions containing millions of pages of content. Despite only being around 25 years old it is probably the most important and comprehensive photographic resource that ever existed.

If these is a takeaway from all of this, it is about big companies taking things away. That is a lot easier for them to do today than in years past when we relied on physical books, magazines and packaged media for reading and entertainment. While I enjoy streaming and it has a place and a purpose for those who enjoys television, movies and music, I have long been a proponent of physical media for the image and sound quality as well as its immutable nature. I have more to say about this and will continue the discussion in a future column. In the meantime, be warned and if there are movies, TV shows, and music that is near and dear to your heart, get yourself a hard copy. It may not be there for you tomorrow.

This is precisely why it is so important to subscribe to Castalia Library and Castalia History. Remember, I’m not the one pointing this out, this is some random audio expert to whom I have no connection who is observing Amazon’s recent actions and reaching the same conclusions I reached when Amazon first launched Kindle Unlimited and I did the math concerning the huge reduction of ebook compensation for the authors and publishers.

The observation that this is about the corpocracy “taking things away” is very astute. This is the complete erasure of a knowledge base, and if the author’s opinion about the importance of the site is correct, the erasure of a significant one. While Amazon has apparently backtracked from its original intention of erasing the site due to the backlash and now intends to archive it, there cannot be much doubt that the company will eventually eliminate the archive as soon as it feels that it can get away with doing so.

This is why the new Castalia Library site upon which we are now working is intended to include a free digital library that will be funded by the Library operations, beginning with the Library and History books we are publishing, rights-permitting. Look for more announcements on that front in future Castalia newsletters.

I anticipate that we will eventually need to launch a book review site to which only subscribers will be permitted to contribute, similar to the design concept I produced for a hypothetical book award that was subsequently proved necessary by the convergence of the Dragon Awards. While it may be too soon for the West to need physical monasteries to preserve the knowledge of the past, it is not too soon to begin building them.

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The Decline of the Newspaper

It is not to be mourned, but rather, celebrated, given the complete irresponsibility and outright wickedness of the media institutions:

The country’s largest newspaper company, Gannett, is once again forecasting it will sell off more of its daily newspapers. Since its merge with newspaper company GateHouse Media in 2019, Gannett has closed or sold hundreds of papers and slashed staff by more than half, and that is projected to continue. Joshua Benton has been writing about this for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, and he joins me now. Welcome.

JOSHUA BENTON: Good to be with you.

FLORIDO: Joshua, Gannett had 25,000 employees at the end of 2019, and less than four years later, it has just over 11,000. It slashed staff by more than half. I mean, newspaper revenue has been steadily declining over that time but not by that much, not at that rate. So what’s going on here?

BENTON: The Gannett that we have now is the result of the merger of two very large companies. The idea was an individual newspaper might struggle on its own, but if you buy enough of them, you can extract as much of the cost of producing the newspaper from the local community as possible. You cut down on print days. You have the page layout and editing done elsewhere. The thought was you could achieve these economies of scale and make a profitable business. The problem is, as part of the merger, Gannett took on a lot of debt, and they have to pay off that debt. So they need revenue. And the way that they have been doing that is by cutting costs to the bone. That means cutting staff and cutting the quality of their newspapers.

FLORIDO: I guess it goes without saying that print circulation of newspapers has plummeted in recent years. It’s been on the decline for decades, actually. And today, most people get their news online. Is it just the case that these Gannett newspapers aren’t managing to get people who used to subscribe to their print paper to subscribe to their digital product instead?

BENTON: Yeah. Newspapers have generally given up on the idea of creating new print readers. They’re not really making new print readers anymore. So the idea has been to shift to digital, and Gannett claims some degree of success in doing that. But even when that does happen, newspapers generally make significantly less money off of a digital subscriber than they do from a print subscriber. The other problem is that there are lots of other free alternatives for a lot of local news and information, and people will be happy to consume those without bothering to subscribe to the local daily.

Better uninformed than misinformed and propagandized by the corpocracy. The only real loss is historical, but that was inevitable once paper moved to digital. It will be good when government-funded media institutions like NPR and the BBC eventually fail as well. No one’s lives are enhanced or improved by learning very important information about a deadly hurricane in Bali or a fatal shooting in Chicago, or by being told lies about war, geopolitics, and the economy.

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Devil Mouse in Danger

The Dark Herald explains how Disney CEO Bob Iger has placed the wicked corporation in a perilous legal position concerning the nature of the relationship between the Walt Disney Company and the Reedy Creek Improvement District.

This was clearly and obviously a legal fiction.

HOWEVER, it was a legal fiction that Disney absolutely and under all circumstances had to observe. The Chinese wall separating the Walt Disney Company from the Reedy Creek Improvement District had to be as big as the Great Wall of China.

And yesterday Bob Iger bulldozed through it.

During the question-and-answer portion of the Disney Annual Investor Meeting, an already flustered Bob Iger answered a question that at first seemed like it was from a friendly or at least neutral quarter.

An Ameriprise Financial Advisor asked, ‘What are you doing to protect stockholder value because of the Reedy Creek problems with the State of Florida?’

Iger went into a long and rambling answer that demolished fifty years of carefully cultivated legal fiction. He briefly and biased covered the history of the Florida Anti-Grooming law and Disney’s hysterical reaction to it. And then said, ‘The governor of Florida got angry and decided to retaliate’, (here is the kill quote) “including the naming of a new board to oversee the property and the business.”

Disney’s Chinese Wall was completely blown up.

Done.

It is ended. It is over.

Bob Iger acting in his capacity Chief Executive Officer at an official stockholder function effectively admitted that the Reedy Creek Improvement District was directly connected to the Walt Disney Company. There was no effort at conflation at all. “…oversee the property and business.” He has now stated that the two were inseperable. It was unbelievable.

The real question now is if Gov. DeSantis and the Florida legislature are simply posturing for conservative voters or if they are serious about dismantling one of the primary engines of evil in the country. Because Bob Iger has foolishly handed them the very tool they need to do it if they have the will.

Read the whole thing, which is a rather fascinating lesson in how corporations have managed to literally place themselves above the law in some states.

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Amazon Kills Book Depository

The outcome was inevitable, of course, as soon as Amazon acquired its much-smaller competitor twelve years ago:

The online shop Book Depository is due to close at the end of April, vendors and publishing partners have been told. This comes after the bookseller’s parent company Amazon announced it had decided to “eliminate” a number of positions across its Devices and Books businesses.

The Gloucester-based bookseller was founded in 2004 by Stuart Felton and Andrew Crawford, a former Amazon employee, with the mantra of “selling ‘less of more’ rather than ‘more of less’”. It aimed to sell 6m titles covering a wide variety of genres and topics, as opposed to focusing solely on bestsellers. While originally a rival to Amazon, it was acquired by the retail giant in 2011, causing some in the publishing industry to worry about the tightening of the American company’s “stranglehold” on the UK book trade.

According to the trade magazine the Bookseller, an email sent out to vendors and publishing partners explained that Book Depository will be closing, and that the last date customers will be able to place orders is 26 April.

Fortunately, you can buy one of our thirteen – count them, 13 – titles that are available directly from Castalia. And not only is the shipping free, but you’ll also receive a free ebook edition.

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Substack Submerging

As I mentioned on a previous Darkstream, the end of the cult of free and the decline of the equity markets is not looking good for companies dependent upon startup financing to leverage their growth.

Substack is desperate, huh? That’s what I understand from their fundraising email, anyway. They’re now hitting up retail investors for millions of dollars after they failed to raise last year.

After certain recent historical events, I have become skeptical of the term “financial inclusion,” a set of buzzwords for making financial services more available to people who are not stratospherically rich. Maybe my cynicism is because Facebook tried to launch a stablecoin for the “unbanked” that you nonetheless needed (at least, according to the now-scrapped plan) a credit card to use. Maybe it is because Robinhood made a big fuss about how many brand-new retail investors it brought onto its gambling platform. Or maybe it’s the proliferation of buy now, pay later services from the likes of Klarna, Afterpay, and Affirm (and now Apple.)

As we all know from reading our 10-Ks, past performance is not indicative of future results

Anyway, Facebook’s stablecoin play failed and was sold for parts. Robinhood’s share price has fallen by a third in the last year. Oh, and Gen Z’s credit card debt is growing fast and furious. So yeah, when someone talks about financial inclusion, I assume the game is afoot…

You see, the last time Substack raised, the Fed hadn’t started its rate hikes yet. Startups — like Substack — are particularly vulnerable to being squeezed when the interest rates go up. It gets harder to raise money because conservative investors can simply invest in safer assets.

Where’s the money, Lebowski?

And during that 10-year period I cited with those outsize returns, interest rates were low and valuations of private companies ballooned. Now, with interest rates coming back up, those balloons are popping. Some VCs are slicing valuations by as much as 95 percent. There may be even more write-downs coming. And following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, there’s a considerable amount of uncertainty in the VC world.

Substack certainly knows this. It tried to raise last year, seeking $75 million to $100 million from investors. But it had revenue of only $9 million in 2021, and a sky-high valuation on relatively little revenue was not the vibe in 2022. The company gave up. On its Wefunder page, the company says that the pre-money valuation on Substack is now $585 million, a 10 percent decrease from 2021.

Any time you see a new platform explode out of nowhere, you can be assured of two things. First, there is hundreds of millions of VC dollars behind it. Second, they are paying the creators a LOT of money to join the platform. Third, the money being made by the creators on a monthly basis is NOT all coming from the subscribers and supporters.

Remember, Clown World is ALWAYS fake and gay. It always attempts to substitute the inorganic for the organic. You just have to know where to look in order to see through the illusions.

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The Wages of Clown World

Is disease, bankruptcy, deindustrialization, and death. A German institution dating back to 1380 survived many challenges over the centuries, but it didn’t survive Clown World.

The deindustrialization of Germany is in full swing. Eisenwerk Verlag GmbH has filed a claim to declare itself bankrupt The reason for bankruptcy is standard for our time – energy resources risen in price. This Saxon metallurgical enterprise traces its history back to 1380. For 600 years it has survived the Hanseatic League, two orders of knighthood – the Teutonic and Livonian, the Reformation, the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War and the Global Economic Crisis, but didn’t survive Olaf Scholz.

Clown World kills. It kills people, it kills business enterprises, and it kills nations.

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The SVB Death List

This was posted on Gab tonight:

30 companies now face extinction as a result of being tied to the SVB failure. They are as follows:

  • Coinbase
  • DoorDash
  • TikTok
  • Twilio
  • Plaid
  • Affirm
  • Etsy
  • Zoom
  • 23&Me
  • Airbnb
  • AllBirds
  • DocuSign
  • Udacity
  • Betterment
  • Checkr
  • Klarna
  • Marqeta
  • NerdWallet
  • Stripe
  • WeWork
  • ImpossibleFoods
  • Instacart
  • Patreon
  • BigCommerce
  • FarFetch
  • Lemonade

Now, not all of these companies will find the disruption, and possible partial loss of funds, to be a killer. I’d be very surprised if Stripe, Zoom, Airbnb, or Etsy found the collapse of SVB to be much more than a minor annoyance due to the particular natures of their respective businesses. TikTok probably won’t even notice. But companies like Patreon, which are very low-margin operations that don’t run a profit, are considerably more vulnerable.

So it will be interesting to see precisely how severe the eventual consequences turn out to be.

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Hence the Library II

You don’t even own your own ebooks anymore.

Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.

This is one of the strongest arguments against copyright that I can imagine. What prevents Amazon or any other entity with access to your files from completely changing what was previously a copyright-protected text?

And how can the same copyright protect two entirely different texts?

It’s also why we’re providing the ebooks to those who buy our print editions from the direct store.

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The Premier Fake Science Journal

The “science” published in this journal doesn’t even rise to the coin-flip level of professional peer-reviewed scientific publications:

Research scientists and doctors are always looking for grants. Not only so they have a job for themselves, but often can get funding for a place to live and transportation and if you string enough of them together from some very high end donors, you can live really well. The thing is those big donors all have pet causes, so you have to be able to match yourself with one of their causes and then make sure the big donor sees it. The donor wants to see that you have done the work. You also need to make sure your research fits what the donor wants to see to write the big check. Many times, the donor can be a big business who would like another business to be put out of business. If it can be done with some splashy research, that is scientifically backed and looks plausible, all the better. Then, the one big business can send out press releases talking about why some product is awful and then come in a week later with another press release about where consumers should go to spend their money.

The scientists and doctors need a publication that is willing to publish some really shaky science so the doctors can go to the donors and say look at this. We are published in this magazine that even you know. So, give us a bunch of money. The magazine has been around forever. It started as a magazine that just talked about general easy to digest science stuff for the general public and was sold on newsstands. Over the years, it has become more tailored to the scientific crowd. Most of you know the name of the magazine, especially if you were around when it came out and was sold everywhere. Now, it just takes huge amounts of money from businesses and scientists to publish poorly done research papers that most of the time are inherently flawed, but they make ten times what they ever did when it was just for sale as a regular magazine.

The magazine appears to be Scientific American, which rather like the old chestnut about the Holy Roman Empire, is neither scientific nor American these days. But it could just as easily be describing Popular Science, which is now equally devoid of genuine science. UPDATE: Or Nature, which also appears to be a candidate.

The New Atheists always failed to understand the relationship between religion and science. Not only is there no inherent conflict between religion and science, but increasingly, Christianity is proving to be an absolute requirement for science that can be successfully replicated.

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