If you sell your art, then art marketplaces and printers and shipping services all profit from your work, but I don't imagine she's complaining about that. What's the difference? In all of those cases, as with social media, companies are making money from your work in return for providing a useful service to you (and one you don't have to use if you don't think it's useful).
On the contrary, I think it is very natural. The environment changed, and thus the deal. There's no clear way to negotiate the terms of the deal. It may be easy to say to just drop off the platform, but we've seen how difficult it can be to destroy a social media platform. Sure, Myspace and Google+ failed, but they didn't have the network base that Facebook and Twitter do which have also fallen into this trap (I'd even add Amazon here for the more general context. Certainly none of these companies are optimizing for the public because there's difference between who their customers are and the public). Network effects are powerful.
So I see complaints like these as attempts to alter the deal and start a coalition. The deal was changed under them, so why do they not have a right to attempt to negotiate? It is quite clear that there is a very large power differential. It's quite clear that unless you're exceptionally famous (which means the alteration is less impactful) that abandoning the platform comes at risking your entire livelihood unless you can garner a large enough coalition. It's like quitting a shitty job without a new job and not knowing who would hire you. Most people are going to stick around and complain __while__ looking for a way out.
But that points at the main question, what was this magical old way of distribution that was somehow pure that's now gone? Mailing lists. Still there. RSS? Still here, Google Reader died (peace be upon it), but the next day others started to grow as its shadow was gone. IRC? Forums?
So maybe the author is really missing the audience? Sure, platforms and powerful interests shape userbases, but it's not like those old sites were run on pure air.
Of course now there's a new possible way to use copyrighted works, and while it's very similar in effect of what human artists can do (and of course sometimes do), there's a very clear difference in scale, economics, control and thus it's natural that politics is involved.
This sounds like another way to say that the environment changed and thus the deal did.
There's still a ton of ads. And it isn't like Meta is making less money. They're just below their all time high[0] and it's not like there was one of the largest global financial crises between these two periods or something. Meta is in the top 10 for market caps and just shy of getting into the trillion dollar club. I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make because I'm not seeing how Meta (or any FAANG) is struggling.
> And there are amazing non-FAANG spaces today like the Fediverse where the author can distribute their work, and the number of users there are easily comparable to the 'old internet' user counts.
Be realistic. We both know that 1) many of the artists are trying to distribute there, 2) that this doesn't prevent their work from being used in ML models since you can still download the material, 3) the audience is substantially smaller and Mastodon is not even close to replacing Twitter.
> platforms and powerful interests shape userbases
Also remember that platforms with large userbases shape users. There's a reason why the classic Silicon Valley Strategy is to run in the red and attempt to establish a (near) monopoly. Because once you have it, you have a lot of power and can make up for all the cash you burned. Or you now have a product to sell: users.
The author, presumably.
> particularly when that value comes at no cost to you?
Who would (has) argued that there is a cost.
> in return for providing a useful service to you (and one you don't have to use if you don't think it's useful).
I think they agree with you, and are making the claim that since they choose not to use the service (considering it exploitative), it is getting increasingly difficult to distribute their work in a way they find ethical.
I'm not sure I agree with their arguments completely, but they aren't really "strange" as you suggest.
Perhaps your artwork has an anti-capitalist message, and you do not want it to appear anywhere near an Ad for the latest beauty cream.
In the early days of the Internet, there were places to promote a webcomic with no commerical interest, like usenet and forums, and it was typical to visit an artist's website directly.
These days, the average new Internet user might not even be aware of the concept that an artist can have their own website, and own the user experience of visitng that website from end to end. Web design in the early 2000s had a lot of creativity and easter eggs built into the experience of navigating the pages themselves.
An artist absolutely has the right to not want to upload their creative work (which takes days and weeks to produce), onto a bland social media site with it's own terms and conditions with regard how that content is treated and monetized.
Places like Instagram are bleak compared to what was pushing creative boundaries of the web in the mid to late 2000s. Sure, there are still fun websites like this but they are difficult to find (what happened to StumbleUpon?)
We’ve forgotten how to appreciate digital artworks.
And this whole ecosystem of credit (or not sharing credit) is undoubtedly encouraged by Instagram (because it's valuable to me to have an Instagram account with many followers)
That's copyright infringement. You can't claim to own other people's work and then give license to others to use when you don't own the work.
And if you're a tiny independent artist you also aren't well-resourced to do anything about it.
(Afaict the best thing we can do is maintain a culture that demands attribution)
This isn't like some TV ad using a song they forgot to license
What are we building for here?
It is?
But also this is dismissive without understanding either system at play. Traditional art has galleries because no one wants to buy art that they haven't seen. But this creates a problem if our galleries are on the internet. It no longer matters how much you attempt to stop a user from downloading or copying the art, they still can. We even see efforts to watermark art on public posting but we also see efforts to remove the watermarks. It's very clear to me that this is becoming a more complex time to be an artist than it was, say 5 years ago. Maybe better than 100 years ago, but that would be ridiculous to compare to as we'd have to get into an argument about the point of societies and if a goal is to make life better.
Strangely this is something some in the NFT crowd were attempting to solve. We can all agree that there were lots of scams (I'd even say dominated by scams and grifting) in the area and that there was poor execution of even good faith attempts, but I'm just trying to say that this was motivation for sum. They weren't even trying to solve as difficult of a problem, they were just trying to solve the problem of proof of ownership. It's not like you can use timestamps or public/private key pairs for proof. It still wouldn't even solve the problem of redistribution or training. It wouldn't prevent someone from even buying the art and training on it even if the artist specified that that was against the TOS (a whole other philosophical debate about TOS and physical ownership that I don't want to get into).
I think you're simplifying the problem and being ready to dismiss without adequately demonstrating an understanding of the issues and environment. I don't know what the answer is but I sure as hell know it is a lot more complex than "let the 'free market' run its course".
If the emergence of automata and internet creatures also means that people can spend more of their time doing what makes them happy, and if people doing that results in amazing art and music emerging, then I don't think that the purvey of selection will be so dangerously cornered by an elite.
But it's up to us to do the work to build that future.
hopefully yes, unless you foresee some inescapable transfer to dictatorship, which you'll have to argue for to maintain your argument
That just doesn't seem like the direction of the internet to me.
As for the rule of law, it seems that what we're talking about here is what authority can be capable of supplying the law. I highly doubt that a confusing and contradictory set of mandates from nation states will continue to be "the law" on the internet.