The World's Biggest Gatekeeper

Jaron Lanier, with his books, has put into words what I've thought for a while now: that the internet, with its multiple nodes, multiple source points, and multiple voices, has ruined everything. It's contributed to the decline of the middle class, the disassembly of the music industry, and the smashing of the publishing industry into a billion tiny voices.

I'm not adverse to seeing the end of the world, speaking in the purely human and social sense, and I'm fascinated by what could be built from its ashes. But, like Mr Lanier, I am concerned with what has happened thus far.

There is no longer a handful of gatekeepers to society and culture, but hundreds, if not thousands, of curatorial sites. The only sites that matter, however, are the really fucking big ones. Mr Lanier refers to this as the "winner takes all" economic effect of the internet. CBS, NBC and large-audience cable channels, as curators of our society, at least had to share the audience pool. Now the audience pool ratio has shifted dramatically in favor of one outlet. All the other gatekeepers are microscopic in comparison.

Of course I'm talking about Amazon. It may have started out as a commercial enterprise, with the simple goal of selling you stuff, but it's now a very powerful curatorial gatekeeper. While "the little guy" is free to try to make a living without signing up with a company to front the costs for production and marking, and keep a good chunk of the profits in return, the little guy can't do it without Amazon. In other words, we're not really as free as we'd like to think.

Amazon is not required to respect free speech. It is a for-profit corporation with no larger reason to exist than to make money. To be honest, a lot of Amazon customers would be horrified if it had a laissez-faire approach to media. That's the antithesis of being a gatekeeper. But it's strangling art.

Smut writers, and other artists who create media that lies outside of conventional social boundaries, are marginalized by the biggest commercial outlet of e-books. We have to be sneaky about our blurbs, our covers; we have to pretend we don't exist yet try our best to attract paying customers. It's a huge disadvantage to those of us trying to earn a living after our livelihoods have been taken away, either by the rise of the internet or the Great Recession, or both.

Maybe, out of the ashes of all the things we've burned on our way to the Internet Age, we can grow a curatorial site that encourages and protects free speech. In the meantime, I'm a little guy, I'll play by the rules, unfair as they may be, and peddle my e-rotica through the one gatekeeper that matters.

Warmly,
The Author