Status-Q

In October, I wrote about my enjoyment of and use of YouTube, but I predicted that, at some point, people might want to shift some of their content elsewhere.

Well, that hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a small step today which might make people think more about it: the new Terms of Service, which take effect on 1st June. These include the following:

Right to Monetize

You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content on the Service (and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within Content or charging users a fee for access). This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments. Starting June 1, 2021, any payments you may be entitled to receive from YouTube under any other agreement between you and YouTube (including for example payments under the YouTube Partner Program, Channel memberships or Super Chat) will be treated as royalties.

Now, for most viewers, this won’t make much difference. We’re used to seeing ads on YouTube videos; in fact, quite a few of mine have them, and I earn enough from the ads to keep me in coffee beans. (I only use skippable ads at the start of the video, since I think those are the least annoying. You get more money if you allow others.).

When you view a YouTube video with ads, the revenue is typically split between YouTube and the creator. This revenue-sharing partnership is available to creators who have enough followers and sufficient viewing hours. In some circumstances, if you’ve included other material (such as commercial background music for which you don’t have a licence), rather than blocking you completely, YouTube will allow it to be posted, but you can’t monetise it: ad revenues are shared with the music copyright owner instead. The 360-degree video I recorded of my campervan trip to the Dordogne is an example: it does have ads, and the proceeds go to the creators of the background music I occasionally include. That seems reasonably fair to me. Doing this does have risks, though, if you’re thinking of trying it: firstly, you need to check whether it’ll be allowed for the tracks you’re thinking of including, and secondly, if the music publisher changes their policy in the future, your video may be removed.

Anyway, this new change will allow YouTube to put ads on the videos where I haven’t enabled them, perhaps to include more of them, or different types, and not necessarily share the proceeds of these extra ones with me. What’s more, if I had a very popular video, I think they could decide to put it behind a paywall.

As well as being detrimental to the viewing experience, this could be important, say, for universities who don’t want advertisements on their lectures, or software developers who don’t want competitor’s ads popping up over their tutorials. There will be ways around this, no doubt, involving payments to YouTube.

But this is just a reminder to make sure you keep copies of all the videos you upload in preparation for the day when you might want to move them somewhere else because your friends and family can’t watch them without a YouTube subscription.

YouTube is an amazing service, and a phenomenally expensive one to run, and most of us get it for free. So the fact that they are always looking for extra sources of revenue should come as no surprise. Especially to readers of Status-Q!

This is a lovely essay by Kelly Pendergast, brought to my attention by Andrew Curry on his Just Two Things newsletter.

It’s beautifully written and an enjoyable read, which is quite an achievement when it’s talking about consumerism, supply chains and waste management. Don’t let that put you off. Lots of good stuff there.

She talks about the admirable Oxo corkscrew she was given by a friend.

I suppose I should be happy to own such a perfectly functional piece, no muss, no fuss, no danger of injury, but what can I say? It’s ugly and I don’t like it.

You may not be surprised to hear that it was a gift. Life would be simpler if it had never entered the house, but between the gift-ness and its unfortunate excellence at performing its single task, I haven’t been able to get rid of it. Marcel Mauss, in his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift, asks “What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?” The gift corkscrew is freighted with a psychic weight that can’t be directly repaid, but can’t be forgotten.

She includes a memorable quote from Robin Nagle, anthropologist of material cultures and anthropologist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation. (Now, that’s a job title to conjure with!)

“Every single thing you see is future trash.”

She talks about the other kinds of emotional weight we attach to objects, (or, sometimes, don’t, when we should do), and a feeling of guilt about being part of the flow of manufactured items on the way from raw materials to the grave…

Anyway, as Andrew Curry said, it’s hard to do it justice in excerpts; just read and enjoy.

On that topic, having referred to my late friend Martin King a couple of days ago, I will do so again today.

I remember that we were buying furniture for one of our companies’ offices, and he was spending some time seeking out used, good-quality, basic tables and chairs, which also seemed rather expensive to me. I probably said something about it being easier and cheaper to get them from Ikea.

“Yes”, said Martin (who, despite his considerable wealth, generally shunned anything that looked like luxury), “but we buy quality things because we don’t want to be responsible for creating rubbish in the world.”

That was a phrase that stuck with me.

I was once out for a walk with a friend who had also been a major investor in one of my startups. I bought her a cup of coffee and she said, “Oh, let me pay for that!” and I responded with, “Don’t worry, I owe you about a million quid anyway”. She laughed, but I know she remembered it.

And so did I, because afterwards I realised I was wrong. I had fallen into a common trap: an assumption that those who receive money should necessarily always be grateful and subservient to those who provide it. In one sense, those who are on the receiving end are naturally inclined to feel that way, because without it, our business, our grand plan, our pet idea, wouldn’t survive. In the short term, we need them more than they need us. But (except in very rare circumstances) it’s a deal, not a donation. Investors in startup companies are not just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts; you are giving them something in return; they are, in a very real sense, paying for your services, in the hope that everybody will make a profit out of it (and probably them much more than you). What I should have added, to my investor friend, is something along the lines of, “I owe you about a million quid, but I guess you owe me and several of my friends many years of our lives, so perhaps we’re quits.”

This is true of employment, too. For those of us fortunate enough to be in the Western tech world in a period of high employment, we’re making the same deal: you’re giving me money, I’m giving you a certain fraction of my life. This is not a master-slave relationship, it’s a barter relationship, and if either side doesn’t like the deal, they can go elsewhere or (increasingly) set up in business on their own. I appreciate that this is an historical, geographical, and industrial anomaly, or at least novelty, so please don’t send me emails about the Tolpuddle Martyrs! (Been there, seen the tree.) But it’s the world many of us are fortunate enough to live in now. The them-versus-us tribalism of management and workers in the industrial revolution, or in the 1970s and 80s, is no more helpful in the 21st-century tech business, or the 21st-century gig economy, than it is in 21st-century Facebook-exaggerated politics.

Thinking about this reminds me of a conversation in a Seattle cafe with my late friend Martin King, when he was asserting that there was no reason companies should not have the same ethics as, and be as nice as, individual people. (He was referring to their dealings with other companies, more than employee relations.) I applauded his intentions (and tried to follow them myself to a significant degree).

However, I pointed out, there was a fundamental difference between business and personal relations: business is inherently competitive. It’s more like a sport than a social function, and you need to understand the rules from the word go. Imagine if you entered what you thought was a garden party, and it turned out you were in rugby match, or a boxing ring. Human interactions work if everybody inside, say, the boxing ring, knows the rules and plays according to them, but they are different from the rules of normal social engagement.

The relationship between a company and its employees, of course, is not, one hopes, competitive in the same way, but it is still a business deal, a game played according to certain rules. This is why the recent attempt by the founders of Basecamp to clarify the rules of their game was, I think, both admirable and controversial: their rules seem very sensible to me, but some people thought they were playing a different game (or wanted to) and so departed for another playing field. Sometimes, yes, the rules need changing. Sometimes they need clarifying. Sometimes they should have been clarified earlier. But sometimes you’re just on the wrong playing field!

So make sure you understand the rules of the game you’re playing. If you’re accepting money from an investor, remember that they’re doing it because they expect to get at least as much from you in return. If you’re earning easy money as a driver because you installed an Uber app (rather than having to apply for a traditional job with an employment contract), be aware of the nature of the relationship and don’t complain because you later decided you wanted something different. And if you should happen to wander into a boxing ring thinking it was tea at the vicar’s, don’t be surprised if what you get in your mouth isn’t a cucumber sandwich. This is a fault in your research and your expectations, and not necessarily in those of the person delivering the surprise!

Once you know which playing field you’re on, of course, you should then be a good sport to the best of your abilities! And so should companies.

My late aunt Margaret (always known to us as ‘Auntie Peg’, and of whom I was exceedingly fond) welcomes the Queen and Prince Philip on a visit to Bombay.

I never met my uncle James (behind in white), but he was Deputy High Commissioner from 1960-63, and the royals stayed with them for a few days as part of their extensive tour of India and Pakistan in 1961.

“I don’t really listen to many podcasts now…”, I heard someone say recently, “…because I no longer have a commute”. This made me realise how different my listening habits would be if I didn’t have a spaniel to walk. (I’ve tried the commuting thing on occasion, by the way, and gave it up as a bad lot. Spaniels are better.)

I tend to listen to a mix of podcasts, but they are mostly tech-related. There are shows like Self-Hosted and 2.5 Admins if I want to know which hard disks to put in my NAS, when to use FreeBSD instead of Linux, or how to back up my ZFS filesystems. I enjoy Clockwise for a light-hearted quick-fire discussion of tech topics and gadgets, and, almost at the opposite extreme, the State of the Net podcast is a gentle, contemplative and insightful chat about broader issues. There are some which cater to my more particular interests, like the Home Assistant podcast (about my favourite home-automation system) and the Fully Charged podcast (about EVs and renewable energy). And then, for something completely different, the Talking Politics History of Ideas educates me on the work of MacKinninnon and Marx, of Wittgenstein and Wollstonecraft.

But brief podcast episodes are interspersed with much longer audiobooks, and it’s no exaggeration to say that our Audible subscription is one of the best services we have, in terms of the number of hours of enjoyment per buck. My wife Rose could never be persuaded to carry a smartphone anywhere, until she discovered it could read all of her favourite books to her, and now it goes everywhere. She’s never used any other iPhone app, and almost never used it as a phone. She has taken some photos over the years – but probably less than a dozen! No, for her it is first and foremost an audiobook player, which can be used as a phone in an emergency.

We aren’t, by the way, walking around with headphones on all the time. The iPhone speaker is fine for most of our normal use, if placed in an appropriate pocket. And we enjoy many of the same authors, so snatches of Conan Doyle, of Nevil Shute, or of Tolkien can often be heard from any corner of the house. In unabridged form, of course.

We both share the same favourite modern author — Patrick O’Brian — and the audiobooks, beautifully read by Ric Jerrom, are quite superb. If you’ve never tried audiobooks as an accompaniment to your walking, cooking or ironing, start with Master and Commander, and you can be assured of many, many happy hours.

Especially if you also have a spaniel.