Astra Taylor
Author of The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
About the Author
Astra Taylor is the author of The People's Platform (winner of the American Book Award) and made three documentary films, What Is Democracy? Zizek! and Examined Life. Taylor's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, n+1, and The Baffler, where she is a contributing editor. show more She lives in New York City. show less
Works by Astra Taylor
The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (2014) 193 copies, 16 reviews
On the Unschooled Life 1 copy
Associated Works
Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition (2020) — Foreword — 86 copies, 2 reviews
A World of Women (MIT Press / Radium Age) (1913) — Introduction, some editions; Introduction, some editions — 33 copies, 2 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1979-09-29
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- Canada
USA - Country (for map)
- Canada
USA - Birthplace
- Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
- Education
- New School for Social Research
- Short biography
- Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, writer and political organizer born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and raised in Athens, Ga. In 2006, Filmmaker Magazine named Astra one of the 25 new faces to watch in independent cinema. Her feature documentaries, Zizek! and Examined Life, both premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and were screened around the world.
Astra is also the editor of Examined Life: Excursions With Contemporary Thinkers, the co-editor of Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America and the author of the Kindle single Unschooling. Astra has also contributed to the Baffler, BOMB Magazine, the London Review of Books, n + 1, the Nation, Salon and other outlets. Her forthcoming book, The People’s Platform: And Other Digital Delusions, will be published in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. in 2013.
One of the founders and co-editors of the Occupy! Gazette, a five-issue movement broadsheet that was distributed for free in print and online, Astra has recently been active in the Occupy Wall Street offshoot Strike Debt. She is also one of the instigators of the Rolling Jubilee, a campaign that buys debt for pennies on the dollar and then abolishes it. The Rolling Jubilee launched in November 2012 and went viral, raising almost $600,000 and garnering attention in major media outlets.
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Neil_Luvs_Books | Dec 20, 2023 |
Neil_Luvs_Books | Dec 20, 2023 | 
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
When it comes to the production, distribution, and consumption of information, is the Internet a good thing, a bad thing, or just a different thing? In some ways, the Internet allows small producers to make a living while allowing for greater consumer choice; in other ways, it allows big producers to become ever more dominant, while quietly reducing the number of options consumers have. Everyone agrees that the Internet has dramatically changed the ways that businesses operate and content is created, yet the forces of centralization and monopolization continue to exert themselves in very familiar ways. The impact of the Internet on professions such as journalist, filmmaker, or author is extremely visible, yet it's surprisingly difficult to quantify exactly what happens to workers in those fields, much less find well-reasoned analyses of how to mitigate or ameliorate these tectonic shifts.
This is one of those works that's primarily negative, in that its critiques of existing attitudes towards its subject are much clearer than its "solutions". In this case, the effects that digital sharing technologies have had on existing high-tech industries have been subject to a lot of discussion but no clear proscriptions have emerged. Commentators like Clay Shirky have made lucrative careers for themselves as cheerleaders for the forces of "disruption", that ubiquitous buzzword that's usually wielded by people who aren't being disrupted - Taylor wants the reader to step back and consider the distributional impact of sharing technologies. A recurring theme is the ability of disruptive technologies to topple one existing power structure, at the (usually hidden) cost of entrenching a new one. An example is a company like Amazon and its battles with book publishers over royalties and pricing structures; who wins here - Amazon, publishers, authors, or readers? What about taxi companies vs Uber? Taylor Swift vs her record label vs Spotify? Everyone cheers when an old monopoly is toppled, but often a new monopoly is constructed, just one level off in the food chain.
The Taylor Swift analogy is probably the most relevant, since Taylor is most concerned with the economics of production. Does the existence of Spotify help or hurt Taylor Swift? Should audiences be on the side of the new distribution channels (whatever that means), the record companies, or simply the artists? Are artists like Taylor Swift better off with Spotify, traditional record labels, or some combination of the two? How about the next Taylor Swift, who is living in her shade, so to speak? The Internet famously facilitates "long tails", which allows for otherwise niche or marginal producers to find a voice and an audience. However, it also allows for network effects to exert their power as well, reinforcing the momentary ubiquity of Taylor Swift. Another famous example is the "Charlie bit my finger" video, which racked up huge numbers of hits on its way to becoming the most-viewed video of all time. This could be considered a triumph of the democratizing power of the Internet; unfortunately, for every truly viral video such as that one there are legions of more traditional corporate products, and today the list is thoroughly dominated by music videos, though "Charlie bit my finger" is still a top contender.
All of this is noteworthy. However, one prominent weakness of the book, aside from its paucity of solutions other than the expected vague outlines of motions towards copyright reform or general calls for more regulation, is that at times it feels like Taylor is just asking too much out of the Internet (a similar problem affected Tim Wu's otherwise thoughtful The Master Switch). If the Internet is just a platform, then blaming it for monopolies that use it is like blaming the ocean for the dominance of the Greek shipping industry, or blaming the electromagnetic spectrum for the Big Three TV studios in the pre-cable era. Additionally, in many ways it's hard to see how regulation, no matter how well-designed, would necessarily ameliorate the downsides of disruption - net neutrality might help companies like Netflix fight Comcast's attempts to charge it more for using so much bandwidth (and whether Netflix is actually in the right to demand that it be treated the same as anyone is of course an open question), but it doesn't help Hulu or Amazon Prime fight Netflix. Regulation is complicated, and in the case of media companies, which can simultaneously occupy several places in the chain of production and distribution, great care should be taken to avoid inadvertently stifling competition under the guise of assisting it.
Though Jean Tirole's reception of the 2014 Economics Nobel occurred after this book was published, his work on two-sided markets, particularly in the telecom field, would have given this book some more rigor. Her criticisms of claims that the Internet is inherently democratizing are on point, even if it's hard to tell from this book what the best way to resolve that issue might be. It seems like Taylor's heart is in the right place in terms of hoping for a more equitable distribution of power in these newly networked fields, but her work, though thoughtful, doesn't do much to get us there.… (more)
This is one of those works that's primarily negative, in that its critiques of existing attitudes towards its subject are much clearer than its "solutions". In this case, the effects that digital sharing technologies have had on existing high-tech industries have been subject to a lot of discussion but no clear proscriptions have emerged. Commentators like Clay Shirky have made lucrative careers for themselves as cheerleaders for the forces of "disruption", that ubiquitous buzzword that's usually wielded by people who aren't being disrupted - Taylor wants the reader to step back and consider the distributional impact of sharing technologies. A recurring theme is the ability of disruptive technologies to topple one existing power structure, at the (usually hidden) cost of entrenching a new one. An example is a company like Amazon and its battles with book publishers over royalties and pricing structures; who wins here - Amazon, publishers, authors, or readers? What about taxi companies vs Uber? Taylor Swift vs her record label vs Spotify? Everyone cheers when an old monopoly is toppled, but often a new monopoly is constructed, just one level off in the food chain.
The Taylor Swift analogy is probably the most relevant, since Taylor is most concerned with the economics of production. Does the existence of Spotify help or hurt Taylor Swift? Should audiences be on the side of the new distribution channels (whatever that means), the record companies, or simply the artists? Are artists like Taylor Swift better off with Spotify, traditional record labels, or some combination of the two? How about the next Taylor Swift, who is living in her shade, so to speak? The Internet famously facilitates "long tails", which allows for otherwise niche or marginal producers to find a voice and an audience. However, it also allows for network effects to exert their power as well, reinforcing the momentary ubiquity of Taylor Swift. Another famous example is the "Charlie bit my finger" video, which racked up huge numbers of hits on its way to becoming the most-viewed video of all time. This could be considered a triumph of the democratizing power of the Internet; unfortunately, for every truly viral video such as that one there are legions of more traditional corporate products, and today the list is thoroughly dominated by music videos, though "Charlie bit my finger" is still a top contender.
All of this is noteworthy. However, one prominent weakness of the book, aside from its paucity of solutions other than the expected vague outlines of motions towards copyright reform or general calls for more regulation, is that at times it feels like Taylor is just asking too much out of the Internet (a similar problem affected Tim Wu's otherwise thoughtful The Master Switch). If the Internet is just a platform, then blaming it for monopolies that use it is like blaming the ocean for the dominance of the Greek shipping industry, or blaming the electromagnetic spectrum for the Big Three TV studios in the pre-cable era. Additionally, in many ways it's hard to see how regulation, no matter how well-designed, would necessarily ameliorate the downsides of disruption - net neutrality might help companies like Netflix fight Comcast's attempts to charge it more for using so much bandwidth (and whether Netflix is actually in the right to demand that it be treated the same as anyone is of course an open question), but it doesn't help Hulu or Amazon Prime fight Netflix. Regulation is complicated, and in the case of media companies, which can simultaneously occupy several places in the chain of production and distribution, great care should be taken to avoid inadvertently stifling competition under the guise of assisting it.
Though Jean Tirole's reception of the 2014 Economics Nobel occurred after this book was published, his work on two-sided markets, particularly in the telecom field, would have given this book some more rigor. Her criticisms of claims that the Internet is inherently democratizing are on point, even if it's hard to tell from this book what the best way to resolve that issue might be. It seems like Taylor's heart is in the right place in terms of hoping for a more equitable distribution of power in these newly networked fields, but her work, though thoughtful, doesn't do much to get us there.… (more)
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Polemical text leaning very heavily on anticapitalism and the work of David Graeber, which you should probably read instead of wasting your time here. Presents the usual case against the west and democracy as core values of the liberal world order, rejects the premise of an arc bending toward justice, and instead of reviewing or even critiquing the data showing increased economic freedom and freer societies going hand in hand with a rise in living standards, increased individual rights and lowered poverty, it's instead the cause and engine of inequality and oppression. While not stating it outright, the point is repeatedly made that the real solution to economic issues and finding 'real' democracy is communism.… (more)