Manufacturing is dead. The Internet is unmonetizable. Next comes an economy based on fear. But when does the bubble burst?
Terrornomics
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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I think the last panel is the most accurate bit of this piece. I don’t think that most Americans are really afraid. We’re paranoid, sure, but not terrified. The fear-based propaganda doesn’t work that well, but it’s backed with enormous amounts of money and privilege, and most Americans can’t encompass an alternative to our current system, so the mess continues. The TSA doesn’t manhandle people because we’re all afraid, it does it because we can’t or won’t stop them.
Ted, Ted, Ted,
Once again you have confused the sentences, “I haven’t a clue how to monetize the internet.” with “The internet is unmonetizable.” They really don’t mean the same thing.
Ted,
I’m gonna take the middle ground between you and Whimsical on this one. The Internet as a whole is neither monetizable nor unmonetizable. Parts of the Internet — eBay, Amazon, Google — CAN be monetized and quite successfully. However, once those giants establish their footing, no one else can monetize those sectors. End result? The old model of business had a theoretical curve of employment with a positive derivative. If you draw an X-Y graph and chart number of jobs vs. number of dollars generated by businesses, the curve heads toward infinity. The more businesses making more things, the more workers are needed to do those things.
In the Internet model, the curve asymptotically approaches an upper bound considerably below infinity. If Amazon does twice the sales this year that it did last year, it will not double its workforce. It might add 10% more people, and most of them will be in the low-end spots. When you add to that the elimination of jobs at non-Internet companies due to the superior competitiveness of the Internet companies (much lower overhead, practically zero loss of merchandise due to theft, etc.), the collective curve actually shifts from an asymptote to a negative curve.
Thanks guys. I was having a good day until now.
Obviously I have heard of Google and Amazon. Bear in mind, not every line in every cartoon is meant absolutely literally. Tongues go into cheeks; imagine a sarcastic advertising commercial tone to a lot of what goes into my cartoons. That said, no doubt about it, it is pretty much impossible for most people to make money off the Internet.
Ted, you would likely benefit from a seminar on how to better monetize your cartoons. For instance, there’s the annual “Success in the World of Comics” seminar, which may give you some ideas. Noted cartoonists like Mark Anderson (he of Andertoons.com fame) may be able to help you re-ignite your career. These people have monetized their cartooning career on the internet, so I don’t think it’s fair to say “it is pretty much impossible for most people to make money off the Internet.”
@ex: Even most web cartoonists now concede that it is pretty much impossible for cartoons with political content to be monetized online, without the direct support of readers. The ad revenue model doesn’t work because advertisers are reluctant to be associated with content that might be controversial or offensive to some. And you also need to have recurring characters that can be merchandised. Something that editorial cartoons don’t have.
The claim that being able to monetize a cartoon and, as such, “most people” can monetize the internet is a non-sequitor. The vast majority of humans living in the United States aren’t cartoonists, or artist of any sort, and would not be successful as such. The mere ability of _some_ artists — no, some cartoonists — no, some _kinds_ of cartoonists — to do so is completely irrelevant. And that assumes that all cartoonists, and all political cartoonists, can monetize the internet, which isn’t fucking true. And whether or not Ted can do it is also irrelevant, though it’s obviously good if he does. (In such a case, he’s one of the “seven people.”)
In any event, this is a bizarre tangent from the central point of the cartoon, even for the internet. There’s missing the forest for the trees, and then there’s missing the former for an anthill.
Now that I think about it, I don’t think fear is really the motivating factor in electoral politics of any kind — it’s just the best cover for anything you’d like to do. I think fear motivates low-level elites — professionals of various stripes — but I don’t think the average citizen is terrified of terrorists the way a county judge might be. Fear is used to legitimize horrible practices.
Ted
Oh, bull. It’s perfectly possible for anyone to make money off the internet- PROVIDED they have something America wants to buy.
Look at what you’re selling- misplaced anger, bitterness, cynicism, bashing the only people who are at least trying to help instead of actively making things worse, and a call for a revolution that most people know in their hearts will make things a thousand times worse instead of better.
Nobody wants that. Nobody will EVER want that. No wonder you’re not making any money.
@Whim: Oh, I don’t know: Mssrs. Marx and Engels didn’t seem to have much trouble selling revolution. Their little book was a bestseller for many years. Clearly a lot of books from the 1960s and 1970s that were number one New York Times bestsellers called for revolution. It’s not like bashing Obama is what is causing problems with my work or my industry. In fact, I am doing a lot better financially than most of my more mainstream, pro-Obama political cartooning peers.
@Ted: The Idiot Whimsical is right. What you should do is create a new comic called “I Love Obama”, in which you every day praise Dear Leader for his eternal greatness and immense wisdom. If you create such a comic it would be VERY popular, with people like The Idiot Whimsical buying up everything in sight. Tee-shirts, books, coffee mugs — anything that praises Dear Leader is a must buy. The Idiot Whimsical masturbates just thinking about the innate greatness of Dear Leader, so what are you waiting for?
(Just forget that Obama is worse than Bush, as has been thoroughly documented with facts and evidence. Forget that shit-for-brains morons like The Idiot Whimsical will never address the facts, such as the very clear steps many organizations like the ACLU set out for Obama to get the closing of Gitmo going. Unilateral steps, that are clear and factual. Shit-for-brains like The Idiot Whimsical will never accept them though, which is why they are perfect customers for a comic strip called “I Love Obama”. Please lace any prints you mail with cyanide though, especially any sent to The Idiot Whimsical. I’d pay to see him suffer an agonizing and merciless death, just like all filthy liars, apologists and enablers should suffer.)
I liked the ‘Bernanke send cash now part.’
Since everyone seems so interested in the internet monetization topic, it’s rather difficult to do well…you’ve always got to be ahead to make the real money. Google Adwords keeps costing more; ppc costs a lot for iffy conversions. Ebay fees sellers to death. Amazon has shut down affiliate programs in many states including my own due to them trying to collect internet sales taxes.
exkiodexian, though I doubt you care, I find your every grilling of Whimsical hilarious and to the point. Our great enemies are the apologists. We’d have never gotten the world into such a rotten mess if people weren’t always listening to those like him. So many people willing to settle for so little.
@jack re @whim: There certainly is a place for incrementalism of the kind that Barack Obama espouses: in a society that has solved the vast majority of its problems, where are changing things is more likely to make things worse than to make them better. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think that we live in that society.
The disparity in responses is hilarious. Imagine how things might be if “the Internet” didn’t exist? The Monty Python people might be right – “people are just no damn good!” Imagine a world that didn’t resemble a Tower of Babel, constantly barking, 24/7? Imagine peace. Whoops! Not possible. It would have to be legislated, and there’s no problem there, is there?
Ted-
Youre seriously going to argue that because books calling for revolution made the best seller lists 40 YEARS ago, that the public wants revolution now? You practically make my point for me.
The reason that books calling for revolution did so well back then is because that was the LAST time a revolution would’ve made things better instead of worse. But the fucking hippies blew it, and now everyone whose not a plant or a hopelessly unrealistic dreamer gets that a revolution would make things far worse for a VERY LONG time (generations long) before it even begins to microscopically make things better.
As for your second point, as usual, you have it completely and entirely backwards: incrementalism is how you eventually get to a world that has solved most of its problems. Maybe not for you, or your children, but for your children’s children’s and beyond.
The thought of a better world for your great-grandchildren and beyond used to be enough for liberals, before they morphed into the selfish, spineless, worthless impatient bastards that they are now. The great liberals of the past look down on what the movement they started has become, and hang their heads in shame-“We fought all our lives for a better world without seeing ANY of the benefits, and these pathetic people who call themselves the left are willing to burn the country down if they don’t get benefits for themselves right now. How DARE they tarnish our name by taking it for themselves. They have NOTHING in common with us. NOTHING.”
Now, I’ll grant you that your two-revolution plan (failed revolution, 1000 years of hell on Earth, successful revolution) will work, but incrementalism not only wont take as long, but will involve much less unnecessary suffering.
@Whim: Not that you’re incomprehensibly consistent apologizing for Obama’s incrementalism didn’t lose me a long time ago, but now you have really gone too far. Saying that revolution in the 1960s would have been in improvement in terms of suffering is just pure madness. Certainly the vast majority of Americans were a lot better off economically, with far lower income disparities, then today. If anything, revolution then seems a lot less positive than revolution now.
Whimsical’s right. Ted is “selling” something that pretty much no one wants to buy.
But that doesn’t mean that what Ted is “selling” isn’t necessary.
We are constantly accelerating toward a reckoning. Some very clever people have been patching and bailing for a long time now. All the easy fixes have been used up. The population’s at 7 billion. About a billion of that group is either starving or close to it. The majority live in conditions most of us would probably not be able to adapt to with any psychological ease. I wonder what tiny permutation of stress will be sufficient to cause a chain reaction of disasters, each triggering new ones until the whole system simply collapses around us all. Perhaps a harsh winter will finally kill off the remaining bees? Maybe a wet spring will destroy the wheat crops in a couple of key growing regions, leading to food shortages that cannot be ameliorated. Who knows. And when that unknown thing happens, a whole lot of survivors are going to stare wailing, “Why didn’t anyone warn us? If only we’d known how bad things really were.”
If Ted survives the social disorder, I suspect he will either laugh or cry (or both).
Alex-
Ah, a Malthusian. I should’ve known.
The technology you hate has been proving Malthus wrong for two hundred years or so. I see no reason to believe he will not continue to be proved wrong for at least the next two hundred years.
And if, during that time, people calling for blowing the system up (especially the ones calling for doing it violently) are laughed at instead of listened to, we’ll make a lot of progress towards solving our problems.
Yep, it’s Scumbag Whimsical — right on time. His Dear Leader has really delivered, because as the Scumbag Whimsical knows, the whole strategy is to just vote Democrat and change magically happens. Like being forced to buy private health insurance as a requirement of being a citizen. Oh, and forcing Verizon to hand over all phone records daily.
These are the sorts of things scum like The Idiot Whimsical should be executed for, on YouTube. The enablers are the worst, the most dangerous, the most destructive. Seeing The Idiot Whimsical get his head sawed off on YouTube would send a good message to the other enablers.
Taking the longer view, one can see Whimsical’s point: In ’68, knowing that most voters supported winning instead of (what they saw as) Chamberlain in Munich, the Democratic leadership put up Humphrey who promised to prosecute Vietnam exactly as Johnson had been prosecuting it. Nixon promised a ‘secret plan’ for unconditional victory. The young, leftist, anti-war voters stayed home, and Nixon won, which moved the US incrementally to the right. So Carter was to the right of Johnson, and was both unlucky and ineffective, so the US moved drastically to the right with Reagan. So Clinton was far to the right of Carter. Voters obviously wanted Gore, but the Supreme Court decided otherwise. And, since Bush, Jr was doing such a great job punishing those who had attacked the US on 9/11, the voters elected him in ’04 (as Mr Rall pointed out, the voters die NOT reelect Bush, Jr.).
If only the disgusted voters had held their noses and voted for Humphrey, the war would have continued, but the US would have moved incrementally to the left, and the Republicans would never had dared to let Reagan run, so the US would have very slowly moved to universal health insurance (or go to jail for tax evasion), and a strictly enforced Pax Americana, where the US keeps the worldwide peace by killing every evil person on the planet and thereby keeping all the good people safe.
And, since Whimsical believes that, and since I totally agree, I have this bridge over the East River that connects Manhattan to Brooklyn that I am getting too old to operate, and I’d really like to give Whimsical an unbeatable deal on it.
Whimsical,
Yes, yes, I know, Malthus has been proven wrong. But that’s a pretty slender reed to rest the weight of the world on, isn’t it? That just because science keeps finding fixes, it’s going to keep doing so indefinitely?
Just before surfing over here, I ran into an article about how Monsanto’s genetically modified wheat has been found in Oregon. So? Oregon’s a wheat export region, about 90% of the crop goes overseas. Except … overseas has banned genetically modified crop imports. Will it wipe out the wheat crop? I don’t think so. Or maybe we in the U.S. will get remarkably cheap wheat products this year because there’s nowhere to ship it to outside of the U.S. But it’s an example of what I’m talking about. In the name of a quick buck, some (not all, some) businesses are gleefully throwing the dice over and over. Bees, wheat, we are now able — and willing — to diddle around with the food supply. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes — tee hee — by accident. I wonder what we’ll move onto when we’ve bollixed up the food. Maybe we can attempt to cover the entire ocean’s surface in gasoline. Just to see if it can be done.
The human race is arriving at the point where, in our massive egotism, we think we know what we’re doing. We’ve always felt that way, but usually, we’ve only been able to inflict real damage on ourselves. It took a long time to wipe out the Passenger Pigeon. It took decades to bring the whales to the brink of extinction back in the 1800s. Imagine how fast we could get that sort of thing done today. And, by the Great Horned Spoon, we’d have commercials praising the activity. “John Smith wants to be your senator. He’s killed more humpback whales than his opponent, the vegan Robert Jones. When a humpback whale comes into your home looking for drugs, do you want Robert Jones taking the call or John Smith. Vote Smith, he kills whales dead.”
Speaking of East Germany, Ted, the government there would no doubt have loved to have the equivalent of a backdoor into Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple, like you-know-whom. On the other hand, given that the process seems to be highly automated, it probably doesn’t employ enough people to make a dent in the (grossly manipulated) unemployment figures….
Henri
@Alex-
‘Yes, yes, I know, Malthus has been proven wrong. But that’s a pretty slender reed to rest the weight of the world on, isn’t it? That just because science keeps finding fixes, it’s going to keep doing so indefinitely?”
No, because , frankly, that’s the entire freaking POINT of science- to find fixes. Sure, occasionally, those fixes create more problems, but then, guess what? Science turns around and fixes those.
If we are to have a reckoning (and I am not convinced one is inevitable) it will be due to human nature, not any technological shortcoming. If those on the right decide there is a profit in blowing things up, and those on the left their plants have duped into acting against their own best interest give them enough power to do so, then things will blow up. But that’s not science’s fault or responsibility- that rests entirely with us.
Science can and will save us from anything the world throws at us- if we let it. But it can’t save us from ourselves. That starts with recognizing the “we had to destroy the system in order to save it” worldview for the complete and utter lunacy it is.
Ted-
A revolution in the 60’s would’ve had an excellent chance of succeeding and ushering in a new age of equality and fairness. A revolution now is guaranteed to fail and usher in a fascist theocracy that will make Americans suffer for generations to come. If that’s your definition of “more positive” than all I can tell you is you need a new dictionary.
@Whim: The only thing that argues in favor of the revolution having a better chance of succeeding after the 1960s was that there were more armed groups at that time then there are today. However, the fact that there isn’t much of an organized left in United States today doesn’t alter the fact that back in the 1960s, there were many factionilzed leftist groups, but none that one could imagine stepping into power. If you look at revolutions in waiting, for example the Taliban movement in Afghanistan today, they have a shadow cabinet and shadow government throughout the country prepared to step in the moment that they seize power. There is a deputy mayor for every little village. We just don’t have that kind of organization here. So if your concern is whether a revolution could work practically, this is the same situation.
It doesn’t sound like you read my book, the anti-American manifesto, or that if you did, he understood it very well. Ivy League education perhaps? Seriously, I repeatedly have said that my biggest concern is a right wing counterrevolutionary coup. So we agree that the right is poised to seize power. My analysis is that the system is headed toward collapse, and that the right will take over after said collapse unless something is done. As I see it, the only thing that can stand in the way of that collapse is a left-wing revolution. Admittedly, it’s a Hail Mary pass, but I don’t see any other alternative.
If you want to argue that there is no left-wing group that is sufficiently organized to pull off a revolution, much less govern after it occurs, I totally agree. That’s why we have to get started. Got to start organizing. Got to get ready.
Ted-
I read your book. It’s a nice fairy tale, but because you have three basic premises wrong, it will always and only be a fairy tale.
1)It’s not going to be a counter-revolutionary coup. It can’t be a counter-coup when the right is behind the efforts to get the left to revolt in the first place. The right is, and has been for forty years, doing their best to get the left to revolt, both by creating the conditions to inspire revolt, and by seeding planted activists among the left to encourage the left into a revolution. They WANT a revolution so they can use it as an excuse to complete what has always been their endgame(the transition of the U.S. into a fascist theocracy)- and that alone is reason enough not to have one.
2) The reason the right wants a revolution is because they know it is guaranteed to fail. That’s one of the biggest reasons for the build up of U.S. military forces and the increasing militarization of the police. Its to ensure that when the plants have duped enough people on the left to try a revolution, that it can be swiftly and mercilessly crushed, and martial law imposed.
Both of these things have been pointed out to you, repeatedly, yet you insist on playing directly into the right’s hands. And that’s because of false premise #3.
3) You know damn well there’s another way. You just reject it because it doesn’t suit your timetable; all the while conveniently ignoring that the way you DO endorse will take far longer to generate positive results and will cause so much more suffering along the way.
Oh, and 4) We are not headed towards a collapse. We are being pushed towards a collapse by the right, helped by those their plants have duped on the left (into silliness like not voting or calling for the revolution the right wants).
If we start ignoring their plants and wake up their dupes, we could kick the right so far out of power that they’d never be able to pull this again in 2-3 generations. And solve almost all our problems to boot.