Annie D

There's a joke about how queer art communities are just a bunch of people passing the same 5 bucks around, but the thing about the business world is that it has actually been that since the 90s.

Except it's not 5 bucks, it's trillions of dollars.

There was a big push starting in the 90s for "B2B sales". Businesses started to realize that they'd squeezed too much of the money out of the people, and that other businesses were where all that money had gone, and you could charge them just about fucking anything.

It became a mugs game to even try to sell to the general public, because it was more work, for less payoff.

Meanwhile you could charge some rando corp a 12,000% markup on the dumbest of shit and they'd pay it, because for them it's just a line item. They probably won't even notice.

That's why you can't fucking host your own website anymore unless you're paying Amazon or Akamai: because your ISP figured out way back in the 90s that they could make big bucks gating off upload to special "business" accounts that charge astronomically huge rates for the same bandwidth with the block on port 80 lifted.

This compounded on itself until those costs DID start to add up, and new companies popped up that were basically arbitrage for B2B costs ... like AWS, where they let you host your dumb website for pennies because they'll make up the difference charging some big corpo billions, but the effect is now they own the hosting market and everyone else is just renting it back from them.

If you're a software developer, you know this in your bones, even if you've been frog boiled into accepting it as normal right now. Jobs for consumer facing services like Netflix or Spotify are the 1% of the 1%. 99% of actual dev work is shit you or I will never actually see, backend services for backend services of backend service companies, consultancies and staffing agencies rebuilding the same CRUD HR apps and billing portals over and over again for thousands an hour, because it's still less hassle than having to hire people directly.

It's all just rich bastards shuffling the same 5 trillion around between themselves, and making sure the rest of us get fuck all. Anything that actually trickles out to the consumer and isn't just an outright scam, seems to increasingly be some kind of freak accident.

Why would anyone make things anymore, when it'll just be on Ali for 1/10th the cost (and 1/100th the QA/safety protocols) in a week?

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

Fii Zerone @FiiZeroOne4/24/2023, 11:13 PM

This is spot-on, definitely something that I think about a lot, and absolutely terrifying

sudocurse @sudocurse4/24/2023, 11:23 PM

"legacy markets include mission-critical applications" omfg

@aune4/24/2023, 11:27 PM

this is the most depressing statement

and it isn't even the most batshit tech thing i've seen in recent months, where evga left the GPU market

Peter Hosey @boredzo4/24/2023, 11:56 PM

I firmly believe that this includes retail businesses specifically. Think Target or Safeway—companies whose nominal job is to sell you physical goods.

I haven't dug into the financials to try to confirm this (though I probably should), but my suspicion is that these companies' main trade nowadays is (a) stocking fees from suppliers and (b) selling customer data.

The latter in particular is why every business now fucking hounds you to review anything you've bought from them, sometimes even before it's shipped—because that review is data they can sell. And they don't care that 99% of those reviews are “yup, it exists, and it was the right color”, because what are the buyers of that data going to do? Leave a review?

The retail experience has been getting worse and worse and the reason, I suspect (but have not attempted to prove), is that retail is no longer retail companies' main source of income.

ISO standard fire lizard @wolf-apparatus4/25/2023, 2:50 AM

one thing i never understand about any of this: what on earth are the people buying the customer data doing with it? i know it happens (not contesting that at all) i just don’t see how it makes any kind of financial sense. where’s the return on investment

gravis again @cathoderaydude4/25/2023, 2:53 AM

so i think about this a lot because it's a huge boogeyman. "we are the product" does SEEM to be true, but nobody at our pay grade knows why that is. market research can only go so far! mailing lists are only so valuable! as far as anyone can tell, it is a trillion dollar industry - but someone's SPENDING that trillion bucks. who are they? what are they getting out of it? if EVERYONE is collecting my data to sell it, then why do they need to buy it from anyone else? where does this end?

gravis again @cathoderaydude4/25/2023, 2:55 AM

to be honest i think it's our generation / cohorts version of "yeah man that barcode is so the GOVERNMENT can keep an eye on you." it's definitely founded on more facts, no question about that, but we still use it as a sort of thought-terminating cliche about Why Everything

ISO standard fire lizard @wolf-apparatus4/25/2023, 3:04 AM

right but this makes about as much sense on paper as "yeah man that barcode is so the GOVERNMENT can keep an eye on you" except it actually provably happens

gravis again @cathoderaydude4/25/2023, 3:06 AM

well i mean, to be fair: the government was and is absolutely putting a shitload of effort into tracking you, and spending a fortune on it. they aren't DOING it, unless you're a Person Of Interest, but it IS a thing they want to be able to do and have built out enormous shit at gigantic scale for. and that's sorta my angle: sure, maybe some company somewhere is paying an unholy fortune for my data. but they can't possibly be DOING anything with it. it has to be an absolutely stupid waste of money for them.

ISO standard fire lizard @wolf-apparatus4/25/2023, 3:08 AM

but that's a problem when sort of the whole foundation of the economic system is that businesses don't do things that are absolutely stupid wastes of money. doesn't fit together. gotta know why

ISO standard fire lizard @wolf-apparatus4/25/2023, 3:10 AM

i mean obviously businesses do things that are absolutely stupid wastes of money sometimes but it's gonna be a problem someday if they're all spending trillions of dollars on total horseshit

gravis again @cathoderaydude4/25/2023, 3:14 AM

my theory has always been this:

coca cola spends a trillion dollars on ads
coca cola has never not done this, thus they have no idea whether it's working or not. they'd have to stop to see if it makes a difference, and that will never happen
however, coca cola makes five trillion dollars every nanosecond, so the ad spend is still nothing to them. thus, it doesn't matter, and they will keep doing it forever.

sapphire @arkflash4/25/2023, 3:11 AM

i think the answer is that this is just exactly the case. people pay huge sums of money to target advertisement, and it turns out it doesn't fucking work because advertising is a sham and everyone is broke.

ISO standard fire lizard @wolf-apparatus4/25/2023, 3:22 AM

the "everyone is broke" part also feels like it's gonna be a problem sooner or later tbh

Peter Hosey @boredzo4/25/2023, 3:13 AM

This is hardly any less thought-terminating but I do think Annie D was onto something when she talked about passing the same five trillion bucks around.

Arguably it's a bubble, but if it's not growing exactly, then it's kind of a closed system. As long as nobody asks too many questions about just how valuable is this data and what are we supposed to do with it (besides resell it to our business-customers), it just keeps cycling on. The five trillion bucks swirls around and around in the metaphorical wine glass.

And if all of the big corporations are participating in it (because diversification of revenue), each to the point that it's in their interest to keep the system going, then who's going to ask those questions?

In theory it should be regulators. It could happen not on the basis of privacy (AFAIK nobody thinks collecting/selling/buying all this data is illegal, even if maybe it should be) but rather truth in advertising: Can the data brokers prove their claims about how valid their data and/or “audience insights” are?

Of course, that would then imply that accurate corporate surveillance would be completely legal. So, not a perfect solution and potentially worse than our status quo. But I don't really have any other ideas.

sudocurse @sudocurse4/25/2023, 4:47 AM

it's sort of a specialization-efficiency thing; companies will have teams specifically built to set up the for-sale reporting. daily batch csv or xml feeds or whatever.

then data brokers and people who work in Business Intelligence or whatever tf in order to do (or sell) customer research. they can buy privately gathered data from existing systems that people are using (or tricked into) on a daily/weekly/quarterly reporting basis to piggyback off a Real Thing you're doing, which will give them something to anchor the data in ("People X who use Y app are likely to do Z". So as a B2B product, they'll price it in the thousands or tens of thousands and coordinate sales over email.

even if this data is all entirely unmoored, it gives decisions provenance: any lead is better than no lead, any mistake is just bad data. it's like drawing action cards in a board game; literally just gives someone a license to say "hey i think we can/can't use this demographic to turn money into more money"

sudocurse @sudocurse4/25/2023, 4:48 AM

this is one half of one column from one of a dozen tab on a "Commonly Requested Fields" spreadsheet found 6 years ago at a previous health-insurance-company-subsidiary-employer's confluence page for the standard reports they sold. hipaa was well into effect when this came out.

Employee Type
Financial Product
Long Term Disability Indicator
Medicaid Indicator
Medicare Indicator
Member Plan Code from Purchaser
Prime Group Number
Provider Market Type
Retirement Plan Text
Legal Entity Code
ULP Text
Vendor Indicator
Written Language Text
SSTS Text

Annie D @ann-arcana4/25/2023, 3:36 AM

The incredibly boring but true answer is: nothing of any substance. As pointed out downwind, yes, the data gets sold ... mostly to advertisers and ad platforms, on the promise it will somehow make ads even smarter and more effective.

As noted: it does not. And it is a huge problem for the entire industry and one that was rapidly coming to a head, before crypto, and then AI, came along and promised to save everyone. Now those are collapsing too and the tech industry is basically mid-crash right now, but like Wile E. Coyote, they haven't all realized they ran past the cliff about a mile back.

Mind you, some of them have, which is why the industry took MASSIVE layoffs across every part of it, as their stakeholders all panicked at once. They blamed it on COVID, but the reality is COVID didn't really hurt tech nearly as much as it claimed because how could it? How exactly is "everyone is at home all the time" gonna hurt companies whose business is literally all about keeping you glued to a computer or a TV or a smartphone? COVID was always irrelevant, but it gave them an excuse to cover over all the layoffs they were already gearing up for before it hit.

The tech industry is fucked on a colossal scale, because the whole thing has been a scam for the last decade, and they are running out of suckers.

sapphire @arkflash4/25/2023, 3:38 AM

this is completely out of my ass but i wonder if part(most) of this is ad network scammers[^a] acting as "market makers" (for a lack of a better term) to close the $5 trillion dollar money passing loop. one of those "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" deals.

[^a] or the networks themselves

multioculate @multioculate4/25/2023, 11:02 PM

One influx of fresh cash into the ad-tech insanity is "market research" stuff from hedge funds and governments, who essentially create money from nothing, so part of it is driven by macroeconomists needing data (of any provenance, so long as it's big and plausible to policy-makers & the rest of the oligarch class) to justify the policy of the week.

mint @mintexists4/25/2023, 12:35 AM

fuck.

mint @mintexists4/25/2023, 12:35 AM

i am scared for the future and its hard to know how to fix it

Panic! At The Opticon!@panicattheopticon4/25/2023, 6:16 AM

we'll be ok

walking mirage @atomicthumbs4/25/2023, 12:51 AM

i think every company that makes something should be required to have an online storefront for everything they make

Clay!@claygoat4/25/2023, 2:43 AM

Reading this while extremely anxious at 11pm was a very bad idea

gravis again @cathoderaydude4/25/2023, 2:47 AM

i shoulda tagged it. i'm sorry :/

@rohit4/25/2023, 6:01 AM

Time to horde.

John Colagioia @jcolag4/25/2023, 12:08 PM

I often think back to, maybe 2000-2005, when a bunch of my former classmates and early students went on to work for Microsoft and came back to our area. They also talked about how Bill Gates was pushing management to keep pitching turning Microsoft Office into a subscription service, and that it'd happen as soon as they could normalize it enough at the office that the employees would stop laughing at the idea.

Companies love this idea, because you might still use Word 6.0 for Windows or whatever, if you still have a copy, but subscriptions make their revenue projections more predictable, and it's basically infinite revenue over time.

Probably the only way to stop this at this point is for large numbers of people to abandon their subscriptions, so that it's no longer a viable business model, and putting that money into local, independent stores. But that means all subscriptions, which includes Internet access, streaming, delivery, and everything else, which are too convenient for most people to give up.

Pinned Tags