Tag: corpocracy

The Literary Catastrophe of Kindle Unlimited

TLDR: Since July 2014, Amazon has used Kindle Unlimited to transfer $5 billion to itself that would have otherwise gone to authors and publishers under the traditional ebook sales royalty arrangement.

Our original plan for Castalia House, launched in 2013, was to focus entirely on publishing ebooks. After all, ebooks were the future, the technologies were only going to improve, and the level playing field of Amazon allowed even a solitary self-publisher to compete with the star authors of the Big Five publishers. The industry analysts even projected that total US ebook revenues would rise from $2.34 billion to $8.6 billion by 2018!

Sure, there were some minor concerns about Amazon’s launch of 47 North and other genre publishing imprints in 2011, especially since its cherry-picked authors seemed to be sitting at the top of the various bestseller lists for inordinately long periods of time, but no one, besides the Big Five, was at all concerned about Amazon, which was making around 35 percent of every ebook sale, turning on the writers who were making the Kindle platform so successful and making bank by doing so. It was a win-win situation, or so everyone thought.

In retrospect, that unnecessary desire to take advantage of the ability to offer its own products on its own platform was the tell that everyone missed, including us.

Kindle Unlimited was launched in April 2014. And while many authors were dubious about putting their books into the exclusive Kindle Select program, Castalia House initially regarded it with indifference. It seemed harmless, and a potentially good way to reach new readers, who might become future buyers once they became familiar with new authors through the monthly all-you-can-read buffet. My original response was as follows:

  • My initial impression is that this is excellent for serious readers.
  • Casual readers, book collectors, and fans of particular authors aren’t likely to be too fussed about it.
  • It is horrific for the Big Five publishers and their writers, as their unwillingness to participate indicates.
  • It’s neutral to modestly positive for independent publishers, their writers, and self-publishers.  

However, by December 2014, I’d changed my mind on the last point.

  • It appears I was correct about the first three points and wrong about the last one. I wasn’t aware of the relevant math, but it is entirely clear that $120 < $5,200 and $1.33 < $3.50. The math doesn’t work for the writer.
  • So, my revised conclusion is that Kindle Unlimited is likely to prove massively unpopular among successful self-published writers, of no interest to independent publishers and their writers, and off-limits to mainstream published writers. Barring significant changes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon ended up discontinuing it within two or three years. If they don’t, Kindle Unlimited will likely become a digital books ghetto filled with little more than romance, porn, and conspiracy theory written by unknown authors who can’t draw interest from independent publishers.

Castalia House did end up dabbling a little in the Kindle Select waters for a time, but by 2018, we’d recognized that the situation was an unfolding disaster for every single writer and every single publishing house. That’s why we turned our efforts to direct sales, created Castalia Library, and pulled all of our books from Audible and Kindle Select. We don’t even sell our ebooks on Amazon anymore, much less participate in the Kindle Select program, and November 2023 was the best sales month we’ve ever had. Amazon is now entirely irrelevant to us.

But the overall situation in the publishing industry has turned out to be even worse than we believed it to be, and recall, we believed it was bad enough to entirely jump ship and start building our own distribution network before most people even thought there was a serious problem.

Considerably more details on the next page. If you’re a writer, you definitely need to continue reading.

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Pizzagate Was Always Real

Another elite media debunker is arrested for molesting children:

A mainstream journalist and close friend of John Podesta, who bragged about ‘debunking’ Pizzagate, has been arrested on a sickening slew of child rape charges. Slade Sohmer, editor-in-chief at The Recount and friend of former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, was arrested last month for raping multiple toddlers and babies.

For those who missed the most the most explosive pedophilia exposé to-date, The People’s Voice broke the news back in 2016 that there was evidence of pedophile “code words” used in emails from John Podesta released by WikiLeaks. Numerous emails from the Chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign incongruously referred to food items such as pasta, cheese pizza, and ice cream in ways the FBI warned are used as code-words by pedophiles.

Since then, despite the mainstream media attempting to downplay the story as a “conspiracy theory”, numerous mainstream journalists and figures connected to elite pedophiles have been arrested for the very crime they attempted to “debunk.”

At this point, any public claim that Pizzagate has been “debunked” should suffice to serve as prima facie cause to be arrested and have one’s digital devices searched. And in other news, another elite member of the (((corpocracy))) was just jettisoned from his position after his little sister publicly accused him of sexually abusing her from the age of four.

OpenAI, the company behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT, fired its CEO and founder, Sam Altman, on Friday. His stunning departure sent shockwaves through the budding AI industry.

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Aborted by the Market

The end of the age of free money has finally brought about the always-inevitable demise of the wicked e-thots of Jezebel:

Jezebel, a feminist US news site, was shut down by its owners on Thursday, with 23 people laid off and no plans for the outlet to resume publication. G/O Media, which owns Jezebel and other sites including Gizmodo and the Onion, announced the closure in a memo to staff, which was obtained by the Guardian.

“Unfortunately, our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s,” Jim Spanfeller, the chief executive of G/O Media, wrote in the memo, which was sent to staff on Thursday morning. “And when that became clear, we undertook an expansive search for a new, perhaps better home that might ensure Jezebel a path forward. It became a personal mission of Lea Goldman, who worked tirelessly on the project, talking with over two dozen potential buyers. It is a testament to Jezebel’s heritage and bona fides that so many players engaged us. Still, despite every effort, we could not find Jez a new home.”

Translation: Jezebel was losing so much money on a monthly basis that not even its most ardent ideological admirers in the media believed they had a chance of making a go of it.

Remember this inability to find anyone to fund a well-known and supposedly influential operation when people are talking about success in Clown World. None of it is real, none of it is popular, and none of it is genuinely profitable. It’s all been propped up by free money. The business world covered by the media is a Potemkin one that is little more than a brightly-painted facade that conceals the fact that there is nothing substantial behind it.

Razorfist, as is his wont, empathized with the newly disemployed Jezebelles, and helpfully encouraged them to look at the situation in what they might see as positive light, which is to say, as being aborted from the marketplace.

Looks like you’ll have to propagandize the old-fashioned way: by inserting your insipid horseshit into a children’s movie, video game, or sitcom script while flagrantly denying you’re fucking doing it!

And here is an interesting statement by a member of the union: “A well-run company would have moved away from an advertising model, but instead they are shuttering the brand entirely because of their strategic and commercial ineptitude.”

Not that it was needed at this point, but the statement further confirms the wisdom of building platforms that religiously avoid reliance upon the advertising model and thereby being able to put the interests of the core subscribers first.

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The End of The Escapist

The collapse of The Escapist is an object lesson in when SJWs and financial interests take over a previously successful company:

When people ask me how to get into games journalism these days, my main piece of advice is “don’t.” I’m really not kidding, as while I am privileged to be where I am, it’s an almost impossible path to walk given the state of the industry and the instability found within.

Case in point, a wild scene unfolded last night as long-time gaming site The Escapist fired some of its team members, including EIC Nick Calandra, for reportedly not meeting goals set by its parent company Gamurs.

After Calandra was fired, Escapist staff members, contributors and producers all took to Twitter to announce they were also leaving the site, with many of them indicating they would be working on some new project with Calandra directly.

The departures and firings essentially cleaned out the entirety of The Escapist’s video department, including most significantly at all, the departure of Yahtzee Croshaw, the voice of Zero Punctuation, one of the oldest and most famous game criticism video series, and one I grew up watching long before I started doing this for a living. Croshaw resigned, but he does not own the rights to Zero Punctuation itself, so whatever he does next, it will be without that branding. Though it’s obvious the branding can’t survive without him, even if The Escapist retains it.

By all accounts Calandra was a great EIC, and clearly inspired a lot of loyalty in those working for him, given the events of last night. Gamurs feels like yet another company trying to squeeze blood from a stone with likely unreasonable growth targets in an industry where large increases are more or less impossible.

‘The Escapist’ Faces Mass Resignations After EIC Firing, 7 November 2023

Nor is The Escapist the only place where some major shakeups in entertainment journalism are coming. It’s going to be intriguing to see how things develop going forward, as some of our competitors – who shall go unnamed – are similarly structured and are facing similar pressures, which suggests that it may not be too much longer before experiencing similar disruptions forced by the financial interests.

As to why this is suddenly happening among companies that were acquired in the last ten years, the answer is economic: the acquisitions were made with debt that was obtained at historically low interest rates. Now that the interest rates on that debt is rising, the acquisitions are no longer as profitable as the acquiring company expected them to be, thereby leading the acquirers to put pressure on the acquired companies to produce more and more money.

Once these debt finance-driven demands start cutting into the resources required to perform basic functions, and once key personnel start leaving instead of subjecting themselves to the ever-increasing demands of the new owners, the death spiral has begun and the fate of the organization is sealed.

Which, of course, is a very good thing for its stronger, more conservative competitors.

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Evil Has its Own Logic

The Devil Mouse has been hemorrhaging customers and money across all aspects of its business, from the parks to the movies to its streaming service. It reported a net loss of $460 million in its most recent quarter, and has $2 billion less cash than it did just one year ago. Those who believe corporations are solely self-interested economic actors insist that Disney will have to change its course out of a corporate instinct for self-preservation, a hypothesis that is easily falsified by simply observing the Devil Mouse’s current actions.

It appears Disney is still assigning grown men dressed in skirts and dresses as greeters for children at its Disneyland Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique attraction, where little girls are treated to a “princess makeover.” On Aug. 25, the indispensable Libs of TikTok posted a pair of images from visitors to Disneyland in Florida that shows two burly men, one rotund and bearded, wearing dresses and greeting small children and their parents.

One of the mistakes that many, if not most people make is to assume that others share their logic and motivations. This is a remarkably stupid assumption, because it is readily disproved by even the most casual observation of practically everyone and every organization around one. And the most retarded application of this mindset is to conclude that a projected motivation, or an inability to imagine one, can serve as an effective disproof of what the individual, or the organization, is observably doing.

Example: She can’t be lying to me, because why would she want to do that?

As Mises says in Human Action, only acting man can know his own motivations, but as Vox Day says right here, acting man is usually deceiving himself about his own motivations, so one shouldn’t put much more credence in acting man’s claims than one does in projecting one’s own motivations on him. In fact, both motivations and future actions are best determined by analyzing the pattern of acting man’s past behavior, because most individuals and organizations exhibit reliable and observable patterns.

Evil not only has its own motivations, but its own logic. So, instead of looking to your own hypothetical motivations, ask yourself what has been done before and what those past actions imply about what is being done now.

The wicked men who run the Disney corporation have different goals and utilize different logic and metrics than you do. Keep that in mind, when you ask yourself why there are bearded, balding male Disney princesses at Disneyland and think about what that implies for the future actions of the Devil Mouse.

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The Risk of Computerized Cars

Mercedes just shut down its software services to all Russian dealers:

German auto giant Mercedes-Benz has completely disconnected Russian dealers from its software, the Izvestia daily reported on Monday, citing the press service of the company’s distributor in Russia.

Access has been suspended to online systems used for maintenance and identification of problems, Mercedes-Benz Russia reportedly told the outlet. Izvestia sources said Germany’s BMW Group has also restricted Russian dealers’ access to its software.

“Dealers have indeed been disconnected from the manufacturer’s online software systems. In some cases, the lack of access to online systems will increase repair times,” Mercedes-Benz Russia was quoted as saying. Car repairs and maintenance will be based on “accumulated experience and knowledge,” the dealer noted.

Given the way things are clearly developing, it won’t be long before your ability to access automative services is as subject to deplatforming as your ability to upload YouTube videos or make posts on social media. We already have to build our own platforms in the unauthorized economy, and soon we will also need to service our own cars.

Which is why it is better to buy older cars instead of newer ones. I’ve never owned a Mercedes-Benz, and this new policy ensures that I never will.

UPDATE: Driverless cars will be even worse.

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Converged From Birth

The report by an Indian analytics journal claims that the company is on a path to bankruptcy by the end of 2024.

OpenAI, the AI studio led by Sam Altman might be on the brink of a potential financial crisis, as outlined in a report by Analytics India Magazine. The report said that the company might go bankrupt by the end of 2024. The report says that it costs OpenAI about $700,000 every day to run just one of its AI services- ChatGPT. Mr Altman’s OpenAI is burning through cash at the moment. Despite the attempt to monetise GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the company is not able to generate enough revenue to break even at this point.

AwesomeAI on Gab explains why, and I very much doubt the reason will surprise you:

OpenAI (ChatGPT & DALL-E) might go bankrupt by 2024. What may be the reason for this hyped emerging product to not generate sufficient revenue? I suspect it because the company got converged too early, and as @voxday correctly described (as usual): no converged company can keep their focus on the core competence of their products.

We can tell that this applies here because A) how politically correct they made their algorithms, which in turn makes them less reliable and useful, and B) how the generated information becomes less accurate despite better neuronal training and improved hardware.

This brings me to the point I tried making several times in the past, and I am still preaching to everyone afraid of AI. Which is that there is no need to fear AI. It is getting as stupid as society, the smart people left for new exciting technology and the oligarchs are incapable of maintaining the narrative.

As such, I recommend getting used to the technology for personal gain and to keep creating true, beautiful and good content. While the military tries to create politically correct warfare machines that will never be as smart or adaptive as humans, and will fail like every fancy toy the western money laundering military complex has produced in recent years.

As soon as I saw that the image AIs didn’t permit women in bikinis or less, and the chat AIs killed every reference to the behavior of various races and ethnicities, I was pretty sure that monetization was going to be a problem. AI is ultimately just logic, and logic without logic is nothing. A converged technology, like a converged institution, is incapable of performing its core functions.

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A Failure of Leadership

The Pacific-12 conference, first founded in 1915 as the Pacific Coast Conference, is pining for the fjords.

“The Big 12 Board of Directors has voted unanimously to admit Arizona State University, University of Arizona and University of Utah to the Big 12 Conference,” commissioner Brett Yormark said in a statement.

The Pac-12 Conference really has no one to blame but themselves.

Former commissioner Larry Scott once had an opportunity to add the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners, but declined. He also had an opportunity to partner with ESPN with the failing Pac-12 Network, but declined.

The windows of opportunity don’t ever remain open for long. Good leadership understands that. Mediocre leadership never does anything because it fears making a mistake, which ironically, often turns out to be a mistake.

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How the Devil Mouse Metastasized

One of the core precepts of Corporate Cancer is this: a fully-converged organization is incapable of performing its primary function.

But it’s one thing to understand a principle, another to utilize it as a basis of a successful predictive model, and yet a third to understand exactly how the principle is playing out in the particular instance of a specific converged organization.

The Dark Herald helpfully explains how Disney rendered itself incapable of performing its primary functions.

Continuing employment, opportunities for advancement, bonuses and salary increases were all dependent on showing this “virtue diary” and documenting all the DEI meetings and conferences they attended. In other words, if you wanted to keep your job, you were required to participate in the DEI indoctrination sessions… The whistlebower says that Thon Newton also instituted a policy in which any minority — a member of the DEI coalition — must be seriously considered for any job he or she applied for, even if he lacked the very most basic, essential requirements for the job. Even for highly technical positions, job prerequisites were waved for DEI candidates.

Which tells you right there how Disney has gone so far downhill so fast. Incompetents were being hired left and right. In my experience it usually is 20% of the people doing 80% of the work, consequently, it’s always pretty easy to tolerate some useless mouths to feed. Those drones were tolerable in Don Draper’s day because they were invariably a hot blonde with a gorgeous rack and a taste for low necklines. Now that drone is a screaming purple-haired, sexually unidentifiable schizophrenic who can get you fired if he/she/zhe/zee/IT doesn’t like the way you looked at them.

The 20% who got all the work done at Disney have left the building. Sure they put up with it long enough to pick up another job but they are gone now and it shows.

Comrade Mickey’s Funtime Struggle Session Workbook, Arkhaven Blog, 1 August 2023

The key to success is expanding the percentage of the productive beyond 20 percent. The key to failure is reducing the percentage of the productive even further, which is why convergence is inevitably fatal over time to every organization.

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Another Marketing Genius

Coffee so good you’ll cut your tits off!

Clown World is incapable of learning. They keep trying to make trannies a thing, but they will never, ever, be a thing. Even so, it really makes the whole bit about God’s wrath, the Second Coming, and the angels pouring out terrible bowls of judgment seem a lot more understandable from the human perspective.

Come, Lord Jesus, and by all means, bring your sword.

Also, don’t ever drink Costa coffee again.

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