Distribute and Be Damned 43
Before exploring the tapeworm role of Google and other Big tech firms,
I wish, briefly, to rewrite the history of news distribution offered at the
opening of this chapter in terms of a media parasitology. The media has
always been involved in such symbiosis: in his wonderful book, Media
Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde, Niebisch draws upon Michel Serres’
theory of the parasite to show how avant-garde movements such as Dadaism and Futurism sought to exploit new technologies such as radio
and cinema to their own ends, adoring the “increasingly accelerating
media ecology” of the early twentieth century and profiting from it like
a parasite.
20
For Niebisch, Dadaists and Futurists were not artist-heroes rejecting
the system but subversives who sought to repurpose media channels and
re-codify them into art. These parasites, I would argue, were themselves
hosts upon another set of activities that were also, in turn, parasitic.
In the nineteenth century, publisher-entrepreneurs such as Livesey and
Knight sought to educate the masses, to raise them from darkness to
enlightenment, but James Mill’s scepticism found a different, more nuanced criticism in the writings of his son. John Stuart Mill may have
defended the essential freedom of the Fourth Estate, as it came to be
known, but he also recognised that it was this freedom that also contributed to tyranny of opinion: “Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is
such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break
through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.”
21
The myth –
and it has always been a myth – of the Fourth Estate has frequently
served the press very well, and has been repeatedly deconstructed by
academics, whether with regard to the rough and tumble of Chicago
journalism in the 1920s or its service in the cause of the French Revolution. It is important to recognise this fact in order to avoid falling into
a false dichotomy with regard to the future of journalism in the face of
recent technological innovations – which, in the end, merely represent
the latest in a long history of disruption from the time of Gutenberg at
least. In the service of communicating its message – and, along the way,
making money – the media often rides on the back of other social and
technological innovations.
To reconsider the media as a parasite – a dangerous tactic in the era of
Donald Trump and fake news – is to avoid sentimentality with regard to
the disappearance of print and the emergence of new, digital ecologies.
The entrepreneur-as-hero model implicit in the opening account of this
chapter around Henry Walton and Willam Henry Smith and Sons is
much harder to maintain when we recognise these figures as necessarily parasitic in their business model, first of all relying on the business
of Fleet Street and Somerset House, and then the mail coaches of the
Post Office and the rail network that developed across Britain during
the nineteenth century. They are better considered as clownfish than
tapeworms: such figures subverted the original intentions of coach and
Before exploring the tapeworm role of Google and other Big tech firms,
I wish, briefly, to rewrite the history of news distribution offered at the
opening of this chapter in terms of a media parasitology. The media has
always been involved in such symbiosis: in his wonderful book, Media
Parasites in the Early Avant-Garde, Niebisch draws upon Michel Serres’
theory of the parasite to show how avant-garde movements such as Dadaism and Futurism sought to exploit new technologies such as radio
and cinema to their own ends, adoring the “increasingly accelerating
media ecology” of the early twentieth century and profiting from it like
a parasite.
20
For Niebisch, Dadaists and Futurists were not artist-heroes rejecting
the system but subversives who sought to repurpose media channels and
re-codify them into art. These parasites, I would argue, were themselves
hosts upon another set of activities that were also, in turn, parasitic.
In the nineteenth century, publisher-entrepreneurs such as Livesey and
Knight sought to educate the masses, to raise them from darkness to
enlightenment, but James Mill’s scepticism found a different, more nuanced criticism in the writings of his son. John Stuart Mill may have
defended the essential freedom of the Fourth Estate, as it came to be
known, but he also recognised that it was this freedom that also contributed to tyranny of opinion: “Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is
such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break
through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.”
21
The myth –
and it has always been a myth – of the Fourth Estate has frequently
served the press very well, and has been repeatedly deconstructed by
academics, whether with regard to the rough and tumble of Chicago
journalism in the 1920s or its service in the cause of the French Revolution. It is important to recognise this fact in order to avoid falling into
a false dichotomy with regard to the future of journalism in the face of
recent technological innovations – which, in the end, merely represent
the latest in a long history of disruption from the time of Gutenberg at
least. In the service of communicating its message – and, along the way,
making money – the media often rides on the back of other social and
technological innovations.
To reconsider the media as a parasite – a dangerous tactic in the era of
Donald Trump and fake news – is to avoid sentimentality with regard to
the disappearance of print and the emergence of new, digital ecologies.
The entrepreneur-as-hero model implicit in the opening account of this
chapter around Henry Walton and Willam Henry Smith and Sons is
much harder to maintain when we recognise these figures as necessarily parasitic in their business model, first of all relying on the business
of Fleet Street and Somerset House, and then the mail coaches of the
Post Office and the rail network that developed across Britain during
the nineteenth century. They are better considered as clownfish than
tapeworms: such figures subverted the original intentions of coach and