138 Citizens
the public sphere than even Infowars: becoming in effect media companies in all but name, they were finding it increasingly difficult to treat
their decisions as trade secrets. By pursuing their moderation processes
secretively, digital companies were effectively censoring individual expression: in their rush to disrupt media in pursuit of profit, big tech has
found itself in the increasingly exposed and unenviable position of being
the arbiter of public taste and thus the unelected police force of the public sphere.
The Eternal Start-up
The example of Infowars is less an indication of how citizen journalism
can thrive in the new digital environment of news publishing, more how
the frontier of social media journalism allows charlatans to flourish. The
reason why so many people heard of Alex Jones and his fake news was
because of big tech and the digital duopoly in particular. While becoming the most powerful media companies in the world (and resisting as
much as possible being defined as such because of the attendant regulation), there is one example of a CEO of a major technology company
who has become much more overtly involved in the journalism industry:
Jeff Bezos.
Bezos, the richest man in the world at the time of writing, is best
known, of course, for founding the company that shares the title of
world’s largest retailer alongside the Chinese online seller, Alibaba.
Started in 1994 as Cadabra Inc., Bezos famously set up an online bookstore because, out of the list of items he considered selling – including
computer software, office supplies, apparel, and music – books were
pure commodities (an item in one store was exactly the same as in another), involved only two distributors at the time in the USA (Ingram
and Baker and Taylor), and there were 3 million titles in print, which
could never be housed in a bricks-and-mortar store.
51
As Stone points
out, the name Amazon was chosen both for its exotic quality and because it would appear near the top of alphabetical lists, while setting up
headquarters in Seattle gave access to considerable technological expertise (it was the home of Microsoft) but, with a smaller population than
California, Bezos would pay lower sales taxes in Washington State.
52
Within a year of its start-up, the company was selling books across all
50 states of the USA as well as in 45 other countries, and by 1997 had
gone public with an initial public offering of stock which raised $54
million – a far cry from the billion-dollar tech IPOs in the twenty-first
century.
Indeed, for the first decade of its existence, Amazon was far from
being a sure-fire success. Repeatedly, commentators questioned its ability to make a profit, and the company only posted its first net profit of
$5 million (or 1 cent per share) in the fourth quarter of 2002, a story
the public sphere than even Infowars: becoming in effect media companies in all but name, they were finding it increasingly difficult to treat
their decisions as trade secrets. By pursuing their moderation processes
secretively, digital companies were effectively censoring individual expression: in their rush to disrupt media in pursuit of profit, big tech has
found itself in the increasingly exposed and unenviable position of being
the arbiter of public taste and thus the unelected police force of the public sphere.
The Eternal Start-up
The example of Infowars is less an indication of how citizen journalism
can thrive in the new digital environment of news publishing, more how
the frontier of social media journalism allows charlatans to flourish. The
reason why so many people heard of Alex Jones and his fake news was
because of big tech and the digital duopoly in particular. While becoming the most powerful media companies in the world (and resisting as
much as possible being defined as such because of the attendant regulation), there is one example of a CEO of a major technology company
who has become much more overtly involved in the journalism industry:
Jeff Bezos.
Bezos, the richest man in the world at the time of writing, is best
known, of course, for founding the company that shares the title of
world’s largest retailer alongside the Chinese online seller, Alibaba.
Started in 1994 as Cadabra Inc., Bezos famously set up an online bookstore because, out of the list of items he considered selling – including
computer software, office supplies, apparel, and music – books were
pure commodities (an item in one store was exactly the same as in another), involved only two distributors at the time in the USA (Ingram
and Baker and Taylor), and there were 3 million titles in print, which
could never be housed in a bricks-and-mortar store.
51
As Stone points
out, the name Amazon was chosen both for its exotic quality and because it would appear near the top of alphabetical lists, while setting up
headquarters in Seattle gave access to considerable technological expertise (it was the home of Microsoft) but, with a smaller population than
California, Bezos would pay lower sales taxes in Washington State.
52
Within a year of its start-up, the company was selling books across all
50 states of the USA as well as in 45 other countries, and by 1997 had
gone public with an initial public offering of stock which raised $54
million – a far cry from the billion-dollar tech IPOs in the twenty-first
century.
Indeed, for the first decade of its existence, Amazon was far from
being a sure-fire success. Repeatedly, commentators questioned its ability to make a profit, and the company only posted its first net profit of
$5 million (or 1 cent per share) in the fourth quarter of 2002, a story