Life & Research Notes

In this week’s New Yorker John Cassidy has a thoughtful review of Chris Anderson’s just published Long Tail. Among a few well-argued criticisms, I was particularly struck by Cassidy’s dissection of Anderson’s repeated reliance on certain major corporations as his supporting examples, such as Google, Amazon, iTunes, eBay, Netflix, or MySpace. These few large companies are the major “aggregators” in the long tail economy. They dominate.

There’s an ugly name for industries that are controlled by three or four big firms: oligopolies. A few decades ago, these lumbering creatures were easy to spot…. Today, thanks to globalization, deregulation, and technological progress, many of the twentieth century behemoths have fallen by the wayside. But don’t assume that giant, exploitative firms are a thing of the past.

Cassidy has well articulated a point that has bothered me about Anderson’s work since I first started following it. He focuses narrowly on media consumption, and in particular consumption via these behemoth centralized distributors. Anderson’s long tail world is consumer paradise, brimming with Wired-style techno-optimism. But of course technology itself is not necessarily good, and is simply a provocation for change. It can induce good, evil, or neither, just something in between. The article got me thinking about these new tech oligopolies, how much I depend on them yet how much I distrust them. It’s not a good situation.

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