The Largely Silent Authoritarianism Of Supply And Demand
Or why “Writer’s Farms” and AI Algorithms, are a covert form of authoritarianism we have not properly addressed, and the ramification mostly effects writers that have to make a living with unique content.
Anarchism and libertarianism focuses to much on explicit authoritarianism, and not “lower key” unjustices that happen even when an authoritarian government is in place.
For those who have been taught a basic understanding of Supply And Demand, the basic concept is when supply outnumbers the demand for something the value of something decreases. In the inverse, when demand increases over the existing supply, then that value of that thing decreases. There are certain exceptions, like clean drinking water, which will always be valued and sold for a profit.
It is already fairly well known that governments can artificially lower the supply of a set of goods, and artificially inflating values, even when there isn’t any kind of real scarcity present. However it is my belief that this can also happen even by non government or corporate means: ex. why Free Markets sound good in the surface, but can create its own set of problems: people simply being incompetent, and choosing on an individual basis to artificially create scarcity:
In the comic world, this might take the form of Smaller Print Runs. In this essay, I wish to highlight the issue of another problem, and that’s artificial surplus of things, like comics.
The most common case in the creative world, is where one writer / artist may come out with a hit property, so a bunch of other people start trying to cash in on this success rather than create their own thing. “Writer Farms” in foreign countries are known for flooding the marketplace with more of the same kind of genre of comic. Manga is one example of “soft power” by flooding the American marketplace. Regardless of whether one views manga as superior, that have changed the scarcity dynamic of certain genres of comic: namely things besides super heroes.
So this ends up making it difficult to make a living as a creator of non super hero comics, because the scarcity of what you produce is no longer an issue. That isn’t to say I believe in interventionism, but I’m not hardcore against not allowing other countries to flood the marketplace: it’s a nuanced issue.
However the online world has messed with the usual marketplace as well: because it is relatively easy to create a comic team, provided you have the funds to begin with through crowdfunding, anyone can start a “writer farm” that enslaves a bunch of writers to do their bidding, and flood a specific market. A current controversy is Marvel and DC flooding the comic book market.
But this also happens in self-publishing marketplaces like Amazon and Smashwords. Although whether this is really self-publishing is a whole other set of issues. But typically self-publishing is scene is an antidote to authoritarian publishing climate. However the market place allows for people to flood specific genres without any kind of real consequences, while also telling the people they put out of a job that should work for their money. You can scammers that also flood the book market place with books that repeat the same paragraph over and over.
And yet so far the state has no provided any kind of legal consequences for these action, and it doesn’t look like there will be so long as Trump continues to be the president, as we all know how easy he is to buy bought off. So we’re stuck with having to rely on making our own website visible, because every other market place is flooded with content, that may or may not be real books. A lot of these people also loath the idea of having traditional print magazines that have a human editor ( or an AI with human input ) that checks to make sure garbage isn’t being flooded: they routinely reject things to much like another thing.
But with the advent of self-publishing, this dynamic is no longer the case. Apparently this hasn’t been the case in comics for a long time.
What it seems to me, is flooding of a market, without a dictator in place. And to me, while not explicitly authoritarian, is harmful to human prosperity if allowed to go unchecked.
This isn’t a problem with worker-cooperatives, but “writer farms” and algorithms.