Rupert Murdoch: The Content is MINE, all MINE!
I came across a great story from Sky News. Great because it provides a lesson about resistance to change and desperately clinging to an obsolete past.
What’s a big problem with rich guys?
The way they got rich in the past isn’t necessarily the way they’ll stay rich in the future.
In other words, a lot of rich guys look at the present/future through the lense of what made them rich in the past. However, those past methods may be outdated.
Here’s a classic example: The rich guy and Jesus. Jesus tells the rich guy to give all his money to the poor. Rich guy can’t do it. Rich guy doesn’t comprehend that by giving away all his riches, he would actually have become at least one hundred times richer.
That’s not just “spiritual” wealth.
The article I’m talking about today is about how Rupert Murdoch plans to charge for access to the online versions of newspapers he owns. Actually, he’s already doing this with the Wall Street Journal, and plans to do this with papers like The Times and Sunday Times as well.
Bad idea.
I was pissed off when I realized you can’t read the Wall Street Journal online without a subscription. This is a very stupid, stupid idea.
More on that in a second.
Rupert Murdoch has another brilliant idea. Charging money to read his papers online isn’t enough. Oh no:
He wants to prevent search engines like Google from linking to his sites.
Now: At a gut level that sounds like a stupid, frickin idea, does it not? But, you’re probably thinking, “heh, this guy’s a billionaire, he probably knows what he’s talking about better than I do.” Right?
Wrong. Your initial impression would be accurate:
It IS a stupid idea to prevent Google from linking to your sites.
Murdoch’s logic is as follows: When you run a search on Google (or any search engine), you’ll get pages of links. You click on a link, which directs to the page of that story – not the main page of the newspaper.
So, as a casual reader, you don’t really take note of what newspaper site you are at because your primary focus is the content.
This is what pisses off Rupert Murdoch. His newspapers are special, and he wants everybody to know how special they are.
So, you’ve got to subscribe to his papers and, instead of arriving at his sites somewhere in the mess of stories, you’ve got to enter his sites through the front door, or front page, so that you are able to behold the glory of his sites and their specialness.
What a load of crap.
Here’s a saying that I first read in the great book by Christopher Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price:
Information wants to be free
Get that, and get it good.
The internet has effectively destroyed the concept of scarcity of information. And, as you know from basic economics, it is scarcity which gives a thing its monetary value.
There are, however, other currencies, as Christopher Anderson described, like reputation and prestige.
This guy Murdoch is living in the past if he thinks he can charge for information and prosper.
Listen to me: The information you can read in the stories of the Wall Street Journal you can get at many other places on the internet for free. The only difference is the wording. Maybe the guys at the Journal write better.
Who gives a crap? I don’t read because I’m voting on Pulitzer nominees. I read for the information.
The content.
Murdoch has the audacity to not want search engines to link to the content on his sites, because he believes that by going directly to the content and bypassing God’s Anointed Front Page that somehow the content is demeaned.
You know what this tells me about Rupert Murdoch?
For this guy, and guys like him, a newspaper isn’t about the content, it’s about prestige and ego.
The problem, however, is this: Nobody gives a crap about the Wall Street Journal, unless they’re sittin in a chair at Starbucks, with their legs crossed, practicing voluntary self-emasculation, and holding up the Wall Street Journal so that other people think they’re tycoons or something.
For the rest of us, we only care about what’s IN the Wall Street Journal. Period.
The Content.
The Content.
The Content.
The thing about charging for information, anyways, is that you can only charge for it once. Information gets disseminated so quickly on the internet that only a moron thinks they can hold a monopoly on any portion of it.
The future of the economics is sowing not selling. That is, you give it away and you don’t charge for it. It is God’s law, after all, that when you give generously, you reap generously.
Charity is not just about money. After all, money is just the middle man. Cut out the money, and give your product or service away as a seed to bless humanity.
Rupert Murdoch is expressing a dead and obsolete and withering away mindset from ages past that is, at this very moment, being overthrown by people like me who are going to end up stripping guys like Murdoch of all his money as he tries to cling to his every last dollar with a miserly desperation.
Greed.
You look at the internet and what you see is the tendency to create the content by means of drawing from many different sources. I refer to the Drudge Report a lot, because this site links to stories from dozens and dozens of other news sites. Drudge really has no original content, but I love the service because it draws on so many other sources. A hodge podge of links. And Drudge gets millions and millions of visitors every day.
The point is this: No one should be planning on a future where they are information Scrooges.
Information wants to be free. And on the internet, it has already been set free.
The music industry has also had a tough time coming to grips with this: They still think that charging money for music is a good idea!
We’ve got a lot of people living in the past.
I like to say that I’m Old School. I’m Old School in my character, but not my methods.
The internet has effectively neutered the idea of charging money for intellectual property. People should not even be considering ways to maintain an artificial scarcity of this intellectual property but, instead, they should thinking of better ways to give it away for free.
The internet has also brought down the arrogance of branding the content; it has brought equality to the content.
The content is the content, no matter how special you think you are as the conduit of that content.
Newspapers and media networks have been operating for decades under the illusion of prestige created by a scarcity of conduits.
The average viewer didn’t have a choice what they watched on TV for news, or read in the paper. The mainstream media got their egos inflated because they forgot this simple fact. People weren’t voluntarily choosing them, they just didn’t have much of a choice.
FOX News has demonstrated quite irrefutably what happens when you suddenly present another choice. They are decimating their competition mercilessly.
What is the internet but an amalgamation of choices? I mean, you talk about options!
You know what all this points to?
Unity. Unification.
Of what?
The content.
Religion’s an example. So many denominations and boundaries. But what does God care about?
The content.
God won’t let anyone have a monopoly on any part of the content.
Freedom of the content is necessary for unification.
Now that information is free, and communication is instantaneous, circumstances are now ideal for the unification of previously disparate groups of people.
People say that the internet is a step backwards for social interaction, since you’re sitting at a keyboard in a digital world.
I don’t think so. The internet allows you previously unheard of access to the most diverse mix of people ever available in the history of the world.
At the touch of a button.
The free exchange of information is instantaneous, and you can access diverse content and perspectives almost as soon as they are conceived in the mind.
You know, from God’s perspective, people need to be unified. For people to be unified, they need to be set free. For people to be set free, information has to be set free.
It has been.
People like Rupert Murdoch are the enemy of unity, because they are pimping the content to service their own prestige, much as preachers or denominations segment their beliefs in order to establish their own prestige and control over groups of people.
These are the groups of people who need to be unified.
You are either serving the content, or exploiting the content.
Here’s an interesting thought for you to consider – really think about the implications of this:
Do news channels care about news?
I would argue that news channels do not care about the news. The news (the content) is a means to an end. With regards to the media, there are two ends which the means of the news serves:
- Political ideology
- Profit
This is it. News organizations could give a crap about the content. They care more about indoctrinating you and making a profit.
In such an environment, how can unity be achieved?
Unity requires that the truth be set free. This means free of exploitation and poisoning with deception and agenda.
You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free. Yes, but first, the truth itself has to be set free.
Enter the internet.
I look at Christianity and I see a gazillion different denominations that are like those big, hollow figurines with smaller and smaller figurines inside them. Whatever they’re called.
Also this information is compartmentalized. And an artificial scarcity of truth has been used to establish and maintain religious control of people, just as the old media monopoly of information was used to maintain political control of the populace.
The internet is so God.
In my search for prophets online, I come across all these sites. It’s so disorienting because I have no point of reference with regards to denomination or endorsement by various religious organizations or leaders.
In other words, this profound realization by me:
I have NO BASIS for judging what I find on the internet besides THE CONTENT.
This is so disorienting, because I’m so used to judging stuff by its affiliation and not by its content.
And isn’t this the way of God? He judges the content of our hearts, and not the appearance of our packaging and BS.
I really have to pay attention on the internet to evaluate what I’m reading. I feel that the internet has made me a lot more intellectually responsible, because no longer can I judge by name recognition or affiliation, but now I can only judge by content.
I’ve heard many a media figure lament the rise of the internet because now there’s so many people writing whatever the hell they want, and no one can tell if it’s true or not.
Make no mistake – understand this: These media figures are really lamenting the loss of the power that they previously enjoyed as a result of the scarcity of information; if you wanted to know something, you could only know it from them. They controlled if, when, what, and how you got your information.
Now they have been rendered obsolete. And they are hating this.
They were never about the content, they were always about the power of controlling who got that content.
Sound like Rupert Murdoch?
I like the internet. It makes me smarter. I’ve really, really, really got to think about what a person is actually saying because I don’t know who the person is. I’ve got no basis for subconscious prejudice in my evaluation of their content.
This has been very unsettling for me, but also a great exercise in intellectual awareness. I’ve got to pay attention to the content.
By contrast, what Rupert Murdoch is really saying is this: I don’t want you paying attention to the content, I want you paying attention to me – or my brand.
Consider that with God, in the area of faith, that He does not want people using His Content for their own self aggrandizement. Therefore, His Content must be set free of their control.
Control = Scarcity.
I would argue that economics is really based upon control and NOT scarcity. Control is about creating the illusion of scarcity.
And, if nothing else, the Devil has controlled our minds – our economic mindsets – for far too long.
Scarcity is a non concept. There is no such thing as scarcity. Never was.
The internet is destroying these artificial demarcations and setting us free, as it sets information free.
Rupert Murdoch better wake the hell up or he ain’t stayin a billionaire.
But, heh kids, doesn’t Mr. Murdoch inspire you?
I mean, if this guy is a billionaire then you should expect to become a trillionaire.
I do.
Sky News: News Corp Sites May Be Removed From Google
Found another follow up story, which only highlights Murdoch’s ignoramity (word?) even more:
Financial Times: Murdoch hints he will sue BBC and Google
This begs the question: Can you really steal news?
PREVAIL OUT
