Weekly Links: June 29, 2022
Oligopoly, Fake Encyclopedias, and Line Dancing in Kenya
Substack is, for the most part, well-built for blogging and small writing outfits like this one. Wordpress has become a glitchy, janky hell with shrinking community support while Medium remains ugly and hard to navigate. If you just want a place to put your words where people can easily find them, Substack is a good choice.
Still, there are some things that don’t work especially well here. If you want to do lots of shorter pieces, archiving, tagging, and storing them for quick navigation is essential, but Substack still weights all posts pretty much equally in archives. If I tried to do a few posts every day, the blog side of my Substack would quickly become unmanageable. (The newsletter part, Bibliophilia, will always be longer-ish essays about books & literature, and sorted chronologically.)
So, I’m going to open a running document for the end of every week where I can gather weird little links to things from the internet that catch my eye—and if you subscribe to my writing, you might like them, too. So:
Oligopoly
Adam Mastroianni has recently found a rich vein of study in oligopoly and consolidation—not just in economics & finance, which are obvious, but in everything from movie franchises to web traffic to research citations. He first covered it here, with more investigations this week here. Across the board, in all areas of trade, culture, academics, and more, there is a consistent move towards consolidation between a few big players while the rest fight for scraps. The 80/20 : 20/80 Pareto Principle is increasingly looking less like economics and more like a law of physics governing the universe itself. Ted Gioia has also covered this from the other side with 14 Warning Signs that You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture.
A Wikipedia investigation has discovered that one very dedicated user has spent ten years writing hundreds of articles for Chinese Wikipedia on a fantastical alternate-universe history of medieval Russia involving a fictional silver mine and a centuries-long feud between the Muscovite Tsar and the Duchy of Tver.
She began her career in fictional history in 2010, creating articles with false stories related to the real figure of Heshen, a famously corrupt Qing Dynasty official. She turned her attention to Russian history in 2012, editing existing articles on Czar Alexander I of Russia. From there, she gradually spread fabricated stories throughout Chinese Wikipedia’s coverage of Russian history. She used a real, and often bloody, rivalry between the two early Slavic states as a basis for an elaborate fiction, mixing research with fantasy.
The “Chinese Borges,” as the author is being called, is actually a housewife with a high school education living in Russia. Of course, this could simply be another fabrication and misdirection by a master fabulist. I certainly hope so. Unfortunately, the new Chronicle of Kashen has been taken down, though I join Zhenmao’s growing cohort of fans urging her to publish and expand her work. I would even settle for it being shelved as fiction.
Cory Doctorow writes a lot of books and articles for a lot of different outlets and publishers. He has signed many, many contracts, and has paid more attention to them than most. This week he wrote about his experience with blanket warranties, which absolves publishers of liability if they get sued for a specific writer’s piece. Here is Doctorow’s experience with a sci-fi fiction magazine:
But then the contract came in, and it included a clause that I never signed: I had to indemnify the publisher against all claims related to my work, including any that the publisher decided, unilaterally, to settle. This magazine, published all over the world, had exposure to legal systems I knew nothing about, as well as legal systems that I knew all too well to be grossly authoritarian and terrible.
Even though my short story didn't have anything in it that would attract any legitimate legal claims, the magazine wanted me to promise that if some crank in any of these countries sent them a legal threat, they could pay this person any amount of money and then send me the bill, irrespective of the merits of the claim.
The whole post, along with Doctorow’s laundry list of contract must-haves, is good reading for a neglected part of the publishing world that I still haven’t studied much.
Meanwhile, On Twitter:
Shopify is extorting bookstore owner/movie critic Matt Zoller-Seitz over hazy, legally-dubious allegations of IP theft. Having your point-of-sale software provider freezing your accounts sounds terrible. A Twitter thread.
Also on Twitter: the enormous popularity of American country music in rural Africa.
“Rural Africans are socially conservative farmers and ranchers so naturally music about cows and trucks speaks more to them than pop or hip hop especially if it gives them an excuse to wear their cowboy hats and boots.” This tracks with my own experiences showing off American music to rural Armenians (minus the cowboy hats).
A thread on Chinese demographics and the hundreds of “small” (i.e. 100K - 1M) cities where the median Chinese citizen lives.
“Too often, I think the conception of the modern Chinese citizen is reduced to a limited cast of stereotyped characters visible in first tier cities: The tech worker. The artist. The migrant worker. There's a whole different cast of humanity in smaller cities. Like my receptionist - the small town local who doesn't want to move to the big city, away from her family, but also doesn't want to work in a factory, and is delighted that tourism created a job that lets her sit in an AC lobby and watch videos on her phone lol.”
I have met this receptionist in many countries and states.
That’s it. I hope to have something up on Bibliophilia tomorrow. Happy reading!