In 1493, Johannes
Gutenberg introduced the printing press to a mortified ruling elite, who feared
that movable written type would precipitate dissemination of knowledge to the
ignorant masses and, with it, dissemination of their power. In 1970, Philips
introduced the recordable VHS to a mortified entertainment industry, who feared
that moving the trade and retention of movies into people’s living rooms was tantamount
to the destruction of the movie business – so much so that the MPAA tried to
convince federal legislators to ban the sale of VCRs (they failed, obviously). And
in 1971, Advent Corporation introduced the recordable hi-fidelity audio
cassette tape to a mortified music industry, who were so afraid that people copying
each other’s tapes would decimate sales of music media that they actually did
convince federal legislators to pass what are known as “blank media” or “private
copy” taxes that are charged in the purchase of all recordable media… to this
day.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can now look with smug certainty back upon those early dissenters and decry their wearying woes. By making books more widely available, both authors and bookbinders found a practically inexhaustible market, and with it an equally inexhaustible demand for ever more unique genres and styles. By making movies accessible and dispersible between people’s homes, moviemakers had two avenues of transmission for their product – the VCR and the movie theater – and it widened the market to include far greater creative variety. And by making music more easily recordable, portable, and tradable, audio cassette players paved the way for a flood of independent music promotion and, along with the subsequent advent of CDRs and MP3s, ushered in an unprecedented era of individualized musicianship.
So that’s one underlying thread in these three historical anecdotes: in each case dissemination of a previously narrowly-controlled medium amongst the general public resulted in an overall increase in both its quantity and quality. The other underlying thread is that technological advances sowed terror amongst a privileged few who saw in those advances dissemination of the very thing over which they practiced unilateral control. And in that sense they were right. By making it incalculably easier to manufacture and distribute written text, Gutenberg narrowed the gap between creator and consumer in the book market, i.e., an “author” was no longer a semi- (or, indeed, sometimes genuinely) mythical far-off figure but a person who quite possibly lived down the street. Of a sudden, both subject matter – for better or for worse – and volume counted for a lot. Same thing in the movie industry, in that an individual or a family wanting to watch a movie could, if there weren’t any good ones in the theater, opt to borrow or copy one from a neighbor instead. And the impact in the music industry is not only still being felt but is in fact still picking up speed, as the transition from tapes to CDs to MP3s has made it easier and easier for consumers to “cherry pick” quality songs where previously they were compelled to purchase entire albums that often contained a lot of filler. In sum, in all three cases the power of the purchaser increased dramatically as the gap between creation and consumption narrowed, and in all three cases it has resulted in the respective industries having to adapt. With that in mind, we turn now to three modern industries that would do well to heed the lessons framed above: academia, food, and medicine.
First, if you don’t think academia is an industry then you haven’t set foot on a college campus since about the turn of the 20th century. Whereas schools are supposed to be about scholarship – that is, teaching and research – they are increasingly becoming lucrative boondoggles. Campus bookstores are among the most atrocious rackets in the landscape, with newer-edition textbooks coming out far faster than the rate of any relevant information in order to stay ahead of interpersonal book traders. Research facilities are constantly being squeezed or shut down outright in favor of new arenas, exhibits, and stadiums. Full-time professorships are disappearing so fast that currently tenured professors in many schools, including all three of the ones I’ve attended, are beginning to counsel students away from even considering academics as a career path. And many schools continue to admit more and more freshmen every year without building more dormitories for them, as if they know those students will barely be there long enough for their tuition checks to clear and are, in fact, counting on it.
In the food industry, new food products are foisted on the general public every year, and the language of food is so slippery and malleable that consumers are often totally unaware that, for example, dextrin, dextrose (or anything else ending in “-ose”), maltodextrin, evaporated cane juice or cane extract, rice syrup, corn syrup, malt syrup, sorghum or sorghum syrup, and treacle all mean “sugar.” The surge of interest in organic foods has had both positive and negative impacts, with, respectively, an increase in availability of genuinely organic foodstuffs and a widening of the term “organic” to include anything that spent any measurable fraction of time outside a factory. Meanwhile federal subsidies still inordinately favor classic staples like corn, leading to ever-more creative ways for purveyors to offload their wares: in addition to its use as a nearly-indigestible sweetener, American corn is now used to create ethanol and plastic, and, thanks to NAFTA, is also being sold cheaply in Mexico, thereby undermining the livelihood of innumerable Mexican farmers (leading to, among other things, an increase of illegal immigrants). And the battle between health advocates and food lobbyists has led to the creation of an entirely nutrient-based information scheme, wherein daily values of fats, sugars, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and so on are parsed and sallied back-and-forth while nobody dares turn over a whole card like “hamburger” or “soda."
Finally, the medical industry, that biggest and most astounding racket of all, regularly gets away with shenanigans that test the very boundaries of imagination. Pharmaceutical companies routinely support biased research that substantiates their claims and/or suppress unbiased research that refutes them, oftentimes right under the absentminded eye of federal watchdogs. Foregoing that, even scientifically sound research and development is often directed by market interests rather than the interests of patients and their well-being, a trend best summarized by James Surowiecki (paraphrased by Bill Bryson): “Given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks or antidepressants that people will take every day forever, drug companies not surprisingly opt for the latter.” And I needn’t even begin to comment on the myriad ways hospitals bilk the sick, injured, or enfeebled out of ludicrous sums of money, but will mention only the ubiquitous fact that hospitals can refuse service to un- or underinsured patients for anything but life-threatening emergencies – and, take my word for it, they are preternaturally adept at playing fast-and-loose with the term “life-threatening.”
In all three of these cases, the unifying image is suspiciously similar to that shared by the Middle Ages intelligentsia and the 20th century movie and music industries, which is one of a consolidated elite practicing unilateral control over something. Just as Europeans in and before the 1400s had to accept what was read to them (or, if they could read, had to accept only those texts that they were allowed to have), people in the 1950s had to watch what was in the theater if they wanted to see a film, and people in the 1960s-90s had to buy an entire album just to hear that one good single; so people today have to hold their breaths and shovel if they want a post-secondary education, have to choose between a very limited supply of food and food-like products manufactured in shady factories by shady characters, and have to stand in line like feedlot cattle for the very expensive privilege of being poked, prodded, and poisoned by circus clowns in white coats if they aren’t feeling well. Or do they…?
To reiterate: in the cases of books, VCRs, and recordable audio, technological advances sowed terror amongst a privileged few who saw in those advances dissemination of the very thing over which they practiced unilateral control. The time is rapidly approaching when that terror will visit itself upon the academic, culinary, and medical industries as well – if it is not, in fact, already here. Thanks to the near-universality of internet access in the modern world, modern students no longer have to rely solely and invariably on the texts and tuition costs of traditional schooling; they can, instead, take their pick from an ever-growing list of increasingly reputable online sources. Interestingly (and, for those of us who still remember high school as an awful experience, heartwarmingly), the same is true for secondary schooling. And even those who opt out of school as a whole can still pursue their intellectual whimsies with quality copy thanks to the advent and spread of open-source academic journals. In fact, beyond that, research needn’t even be restricted to academic journals anymore: while searching for a publisher for an article I wrote about Lyme disease I posted it on a popular hosting site, just so my friends could see it, and the readership generated by Facebook and various Lyme support groups has led me to think it’s a better idea simply to leave it there.
Meanwhile people living in settings where a visit to a farmer’s market or food co-op is not a feasible option are now delightfully finding themselves able to tap into a widening array of online food-sharing services, such that it is no longer impossible to imagine buying grass-fed beef or heirloom tomatoes in a middle class suburb; and, as basic economic science dictates, as that array continues to widen the costs will concomitantly drop. Certain beneficent organizations are also going about distributing online coupons for those who have access to healthful food choices but simply can’t afford them. And on top of this there is an ever-increasing abundance of information, spanning the gamut from best-selling authors like Michael Pollan to bloggers who happen to have an interest in nutrition, so that even the everyday supermarket consumer can dispense with all that mystifying poly-unsaturated-omega-fatty-pasteurized-antioxidant-riboflavin nonsense and simply *know* that leafy green things and free-range animal bits are better than their alternatives.
The same is also true of the medical industry: an absolutely dizzying profusion of online services offer patients access to their own medical tests, peer-reviewed literature, and (legitimate or otherwise) affordable pharmacies, and while a serious condition still necessitates visiting a hospital it is now easier than ever to arrange that visit in a place not hemmed-in by legislature and/or bullied by insurance company goons – in Canada, say, or even Mexico, where more and more American-educated doctors and dentists are setting up their practices for that very reason. Last year I contracted Lyme disease while working long hours outside and, foolishly, not wearing insect repellant, and I paid my way through four hospitals and 15 doctors before I finally realized that I could order my own serological tests and, depending on their results, direct my own treatment via an online community of medical professionals eager to practice outside the watchful gaze of what they call “Big Pharma.” I have since counseled others to do the same.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can now look with smug certainty back upon those early dissenters and decry their wearying woes. By making books more widely available, both authors and bookbinders found a practically inexhaustible market, and with it an equally inexhaustible demand for ever more unique genres and styles. By making movies accessible and dispersible between people’s homes, moviemakers had two avenues of transmission for their product – the VCR and the movie theater – and it widened the market to include far greater creative variety. And by making music more easily recordable, portable, and tradable, audio cassette players paved the way for a flood of independent music promotion and, along with the subsequent advent of CDRs and MP3s, ushered in an unprecedented era of individualized musicianship.
So that’s one underlying thread in these three historical anecdotes: in each case dissemination of a previously narrowly-controlled medium amongst the general public resulted in an overall increase in both its quantity and quality. The other underlying thread is that technological advances sowed terror amongst a privileged few who saw in those advances dissemination of the very thing over which they practiced unilateral control. And in that sense they were right. By making it incalculably easier to manufacture and distribute written text, Gutenberg narrowed the gap between creator and consumer in the book market, i.e., an “author” was no longer a semi- (or, indeed, sometimes genuinely) mythical far-off figure but a person who quite possibly lived down the street. Of a sudden, both subject matter – for better or for worse – and volume counted for a lot. Same thing in the movie industry, in that an individual or a family wanting to watch a movie could, if there weren’t any good ones in the theater, opt to borrow or copy one from a neighbor instead. And the impact in the music industry is not only still being felt but is in fact still picking up speed, as the transition from tapes to CDs to MP3s has made it easier and easier for consumers to “cherry pick” quality songs where previously they were compelled to purchase entire albums that often contained a lot of filler. In sum, in all three cases the power of the purchaser increased dramatically as the gap between creation and consumption narrowed, and in all three cases it has resulted in the respective industries having to adapt. With that in mind, we turn now to three modern industries that would do well to heed the lessons framed above: academia, food, and medicine.
First, if you don’t think academia is an industry then you haven’t set foot on a college campus since about the turn of the 20th century. Whereas schools are supposed to be about scholarship – that is, teaching and research – they are increasingly becoming lucrative boondoggles. Campus bookstores are among the most atrocious rackets in the landscape, with newer-edition textbooks coming out far faster than the rate of any relevant information in order to stay ahead of interpersonal book traders. Research facilities are constantly being squeezed or shut down outright in favor of new arenas, exhibits, and stadiums. Full-time professorships are disappearing so fast that currently tenured professors in many schools, including all three of the ones I’ve attended, are beginning to counsel students away from even considering academics as a career path. And many schools continue to admit more and more freshmen every year without building more dormitories for them, as if they know those students will barely be there long enough for their tuition checks to clear and are, in fact, counting on it.
In the food industry, new food products are foisted on the general public every year, and the language of food is so slippery and malleable that consumers are often totally unaware that, for example, dextrin, dextrose (or anything else ending in “-ose”), maltodextrin, evaporated cane juice or cane extract, rice syrup, corn syrup, malt syrup, sorghum or sorghum syrup, and treacle all mean “sugar.” The surge of interest in organic foods has had both positive and negative impacts, with, respectively, an increase in availability of genuinely organic foodstuffs and a widening of the term “organic” to include anything that spent any measurable fraction of time outside a factory. Meanwhile federal subsidies still inordinately favor classic staples like corn, leading to ever-more creative ways for purveyors to offload their wares: in addition to its use as a nearly-indigestible sweetener, American corn is now used to create ethanol and plastic, and, thanks to NAFTA, is also being sold cheaply in Mexico, thereby undermining the livelihood of innumerable Mexican farmers (leading to, among other things, an increase of illegal immigrants). And the battle between health advocates and food lobbyists has led to the creation of an entirely nutrient-based information scheme, wherein daily values of fats, sugars, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and so on are parsed and sallied back-and-forth while nobody dares turn over a whole card like “hamburger” or “soda."
Finally, the medical industry, that biggest and most astounding racket of all, regularly gets away with shenanigans that test the very boundaries of imagination. Pharmaceutical companies routinely support biased research that substantiates their claims and/or suppress unbiased research that refutes them, oftentimes right under the absentminded eye of federal watchdogs. Foregoing that, even scientifically sound research and development is often directed by market interests rather than the interests of patients and their well-being, a trend best summarized by James Surowiecki (paraphrased by Bill Bryson): “Given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks or antidepressants that people will take every day forever, drug companies not surprisingly opt for the latter.” And I needn’t even begin to comment on the myriad ways hospitals bilk the sick, injured, or enfeebled out of ludicrous sums of money, but will mention only the ubiquitous fact that hospitals can refuse service to un- or underinsured patients for anything but life-threatening emergencies – and, take my word for it, they are preternaturally adept at playing fast-and-loose with the term “life-threatening.”
In all three of these cases, the unifying image is suspiciously similar to that shared by the Middle Ages intelligentsia and the 20th century movie and music industries, which is one of a consolidated elite practicing unilateral control over something. Just as Europeans in and before the 1400s had to accept what was read to them (or, if they could read, had to accept only those texts that they were allowed to have), people in the 1950s had to watch what was in the theater if they wanted to see a film, and people in the 1960s-90s had to buy an entire album just to hear that one good single; so people today have to hold their breaths and shovel if they want a post-secondary education, have to choose between a very limited supply of food and food-like products manufactured in shady factories by shady characters, and have to stand in line like feedlot cattle for the very expensive privilege of being poked, prodded, and poisoned by circus clowns in white coats if they aren’t feeling well. Or do they…?
To reiterate: in the cases of books, VCRs, and recordable audio, technological advances sowed terror amongst a privileged few who saw in those advances dissemination of the very thing over which they practiced unilateral control. The time is rapidly approaching when that terror will visit itself upon the academic, culinary, and medical industries as well – if it is not, in fact, already here. Thanks to the near-universality of internet access in the modern world, modern students no longer have to rely solely and invariably on the texts and tuition costs of traditional schooling; they can, instead, take their pick from an ever-growing list of increasingly reputable online sources. Interestingly (and, for those of us who still remember high school as an awful experience, heartwarmingly), the same is true for secondary schooling. And even those who opt out of school as a whole can still pursue their intellectual whimsies with quality copy thanks to the advent and spread of open-source academic journals. In fact, beyond that, research needn’t even be restricted to academic journals anymore: while searching for a publisher for an article I wrote about Lyme disease I posted it on a popular hosting site, just so my friends could see it, and the readership generated by Facebook and various Lyme support groups has led me to think it’s a better idea simply to leave it there.
Meanwhile people living in settings where a visit to a farmer’s market or food co-op is not a feasible option are now delightfully finding themselves able to tap into a widening array of online food-sharing services, such that it is no longer impossible to imagine buying grass-fed beef or heirloom tomatoes in a middle class suburb; and, as basic economic science dictates, as that array continues to widen the costs will concomitantly drop. Certain beneficent organizations are also going about distributing online coupons for those who have access to healthful food choices but simply can’t afford them. And on top of this there is an ever-increasing abundance of information, spanning the gamut from best-selling authors like Michael Pollan to bloggers who happen to have an interest in nutrition, so that even the everyday supermarket consumer can dispense with all that mystifying poly-unsaturated-omega-fatty-pasteurized-antioxidant-riboflavin nonsense and simply *know* that leafy green things and free-range animal bits are better than their alternatives.
The same is also true of the medical industry: an absolutely dizzying profusion of online services offer patients access to their own medical tests, peer-reviewed literature, and (legitimate or otherwise) affordable pharmacies, and while a serious condition still necessitates visiting a hospital it is now easier than ever to arrange that visit in a place not hemmed-in by legislature and/or bullied by insurance company goons – in Canada, say, or even Mexico, where more and more American-educated doctors and dentists are setting up their practices for that very reason. Last year I contracted Lyme disease while working long hours outside and, foolishly, not wearing insect repellant, and I paid my way through four hospitals and 15 doctors before I finally realized that I could order my own serological tests and, depending on their results, direct my own treatment via an online community of medical professionals eager to practice outside the watchful gaze of what they call “Big Pharma.” I have since counseled others to do the same.
It is, in short, easier than ever to circumvent the unpalatable rigors of consolidated academic, culinary, and medical power structures in exactly the same way that printing presses and recordable media made it possible to circumvent theirs. The internet, central instrument of the Information Explosion, connects discriminate thinkers with a widening choice of teachers and research services, discriminate eaters with a widening choice of foods and/or information about foods, and discriminate sufferers with a widening choice of healthcare alternatives – and all at a rapidly accelerating pace. For those in power, the choice is clear: adapt, or perish. I for one don’t care which it is.
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