Week in review: Sep 21 – Sep 28
A quiet week, joined by two media essays on how attention and value flow: Napster's remix of the music business, and Cory Doctorow's split between real LLMs and fake AI.
A deliberately light week — two items, and both happen to rhyme. One looks backward at how a technology upended an entertainment industry’s business model; the other argues we’re living through the early days of exactly such an upend, and that the marketing around it obscures what the technology actually does.
Chris Kohler’s How We Got Here episode traces how Napster made recorded music free and ubiquitous, and how the industry spent a decade resisting that reality before finally rebuilding around streaming — a reminder that distribution shocks win eventually, and the interesting question is who ends up collecting. On the same theme from the present day, Cory Doctorow’s “LLMs are real, AI is fake” presses the distinction between the concrete, useful tool in front of us and the investment-fable of general machine minds built on top of it. Worth reading side by side: both are about the gap between what a technology does and what people are sold it will do.
Notable items
- LLMs are real, AI is fake — Doctorow separates the genuinely useful LLM from the “AI” myth doing the fundraising, plus a tour of his sold-out-looking-but-half-empty talk circuit.
- How They Got Us To Pay For Music Again (How We Got Here with Chris Kohler) — on Napster’s rise from a 19-year-old’s 1999 launch to the shock that forced the music industry to reinvent how — and whether — listeners pay.