Dan Davies wrote a whole book on this topic, The Unaccountability Machine [1]. In it, he creates the concept of "accountability sinks": organisational structures or systems which abstract the source of a decision away from individuals so that no specific person can be held accountable.
Davies writes: "For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system."
> Dan Davies wrote a whole book on this topic, The Unaccountability Machine [1]. In it, he creates the concept of "accountability sinks": organisational structures or systems which abstract the source of a decision away from individuals so that no specific person can be held accountable.
The market itself seems to be the epitome of an accountability sink. All kinds of terrible things are done in the name of responding to market incentives, and when someone complains about those things, there's always some guy who points the blame at you the consumer with some BS about "revealed preferences" or the like.
The market itself optimizes for creating companies that are accountability sinks, for obvious reasons.
Regarding that guy, it’s because generally people have two approach to the market: to some the market is just a tool to an end goal, an economic system like any another, it has to be evaluated and corrected to serve that goal if it deviates. To other people, there is no goal, the market is philosophically always right, because it is an economic extension of individual liberty (which is debatable of course, I think Locke was not a proponent of laissez-faire for example).
I was really hoping this would be doing something obscure with git, I was curious why someone would pay a subscription for something that's a built-in git feature.
Unfortunately this was much more nefarious. I do see why some would pay for, I just wish they wouldn't/didn't have the option to
I kind of get a vibe of AI-generated, human-edited article out of this. Not much of the super obvious patterns I'm familiar with, but there is this repeated/reworded paragraph:
> Charging the $1,000+ market-clearing price would eliminate scalping, maximize revenue, and maximize aggregate consumer welfare. But it would also destroy the artist's relationship with their fans, as they would be seen as the greedy artist who priced out their true fans.
> Artists and sports leagues know the market-clearing price for their tickets is $1,000+. They know that direct pricing would eliminate scalping and maximize revenue. But they also know that directly charging these prices would destroy their carefully cultivated relationship with fans. Nobody wants to be seen as the greedy artist who priced out the true believers.
Moreover, the content of the article seems very superficial and not grounded in reality. To my cursory understanding with a few minutes of research into the topic, Taylor Swift tickets do not, in fact, retail for $1000+ with the help of Ticketmaster. It is the scalpers who charge that. Taylor Swift does not see any of the additional money when a prime seating ticket retails for $300 and is then re-sold for $6000. The premise that an artist allows Ticketmaster to get a cut in order to sell a ticket at the market-clearing rate seems factually incorrect, and therefore the entire posited relationship between artist and Ticketmaster is incorrect.
As far as I understand, Ticketmaster has deals with the most valuable venues in the US such that if you want to perform at the venue, you must use Ticketmaster. It is not that you as an artist choose to use Ticketmaster to inflate your ticket prices for you while deflecting the blame, but rather that if you aren't willing to give Ticketmaster their cut you don't get access to desirable venues at all.
I'm open to correction if someone who is more informed on the topic wishes to chime in, but I would hesitate to take this article at face value. It seems crafted to sell an emotional narrative rather than making accurate observations of reality.
Ignoring the part about your vibes, Ticketmasters business strategy is well covered at this point and it is precisely what you claim it isn't.
It first sells the ticket, that's the money that partially goes to the creator... And then it lets the buyers resell their ticket through it's platform, which you correctly identified as scalping, but that's kinda core to is profit strategy
I'm aware that Ticketmaster supports scalping and profits from it itself. However, the premise of the article is that the artist hires Ticketmaster and profits from allowing Ticketmaster to do this on their behalf. Where is "blame as a service" here, when the reality is that Tickermaster is engaging in rent-seeking behaviour, extracting excess profit solely for its own benefit and not the artist's?
I think the blame as a service is about the exorbitant fees that Ticketmaster charges. I have heard that some of those fees often go back to the artist.
I'd be very interested in a more reputable source than "I have heard". It would make a substantial difference in the validity of the premise of the article, but I can't find anything that suggests this is actually the case other than baseless speculation on forum threads. I've read a lot of Reddit posts asserting that artists are in cahoots with Ticketmaster and not a lot of any evidence. Ticketmaster itself, as well as anything I can find written by journalists, suggests that the artist gets only the face value of the ticket and the fees are shared between Ticketmaster and the venue.
I was told this by people that worked for Ticketmaster. They worked on their software team so they wouldn't have been "in the know" on that kind of stuff, so it's possible they were just extrapolating from the same Reddit posts and articles everyone else is.
I love the rebranding of corporate villainy as “Blame as a Service”; it makes it easier to discuss these sleaze-bags in the open without getting into nitty-gritty technicalities that derail the core conversation.
Also fitting that McKinsey (and by extension, most “business consultancy” companies) get the first shoutout as a prime example of BaaS. Despite lending their support to decades of awful, and at times morally evil decisions, the arrangement allows both business elites and McKinsey themselves to escape blame via simple finger-pointing, the masses largely unaware that said negative outcomes were the goal all along.
To fix broken systems, we must find ways of distilling complex and nuanced topics into simple-to-communicate concepts, vocabulary, and slang. Blame-as-a-Service accomplishes that nicely, and will hopefully allow a redirection back towards the core point of many such discussions: accountability, or lack thereof.
How about the most obvious ones? AWS? Cloudflare outage? I saw nobody get anything other than a grunt this week. Who cares? What can we do? It'll be up when it's up.
I also had a client this week have a physical server catch on fire and burn down everything. Backups don't count when they're in the same room.
Dan Davies wrote a whole book on this topic, The Unaccountability Machine [1]. In it, he creates the concept of "accountability sinks": organisational structures or systems which abstract the source of a decision away from individuals so that no specific person can be held accountable.
Davies writes: "For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system."
For a good short overview, see this piece by Mandy Brown: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks
[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo252799...
> Dan Davies wrote a whole book on this topic, The Unaccountability Machine [1]. In it, he creates the concept of "accountability sinks": organisational structures or systems which abstract the source of a decision away from individuals so that no specific person can be held accountable.
The market itself seems to be the epitome of an accountability sink. All kinds of terrible things are done in the name of responding to market incentives, and when someone complains about those things, there's always some guy who points the blame at you the consumer with some BS about "revealed preferences" or the like.
The market itself optimizes for creating companies that are accountability sinks, for obvious reasons.
Regarding that guy, it’s because generally people have two approach to the market: to some the market is just a tool to an end goal, an economic system like any another, it has to be evaluated and corrected to serve that goal if it deviates. To other people, there is no goal, the market is philosophically always right, because it is an economic extension of individual liberty (which is debatable of course, I think Locke was not a proponent of laissez-faire for example).
Haha as I read this, I was reminded of Jiffy Express: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e134NoLyTug
I was really hoping this would be doing something obscure with git, I was curious why someone would pay a subscription for something that's a built-in git feature.
Unfortunately this was much more nefarious. I do see why some would pay for, I just wish they wouldn't/didn't have the option to
I kind of get a vibe of AI-generated, human-edited article out of this. Not much of the super obvious patterns I'm familiar with, but there is this repeated/reworded paragraph:
> Charging the $1,000+ market-clearing price would eliminate scalping, maximize revenue, and maximize aggregate consumer welfare. But it would also destroy the artist's relationship with their fans, as they would be seen as the greedy artist who priced out their true fans.
> Artists and sports leagues know the market-clearing price for their tickets is $1,000+. They know that direct pricing would eliminate scalping and maximize revenue. But they also know that directly charging these prices would destroy their carefully cultivated relationship with fans. Nobody wants to be seen as the greedy artist who priced out the true believers.
Moreover, the content of the article seems very superficial and not grounded in reality. To my cursory understanding with a few minutes of research into the topic, Taylor Swift tickets do not, in fact, retail for $1000+ with the help of Ticketmaster. It is the scalpers who charge that. Taylor Swift does not see any of the additional money when a prime seating ticket retails for $300 and is then re-sold for $6000. The premise that an artist allows Ticketmaster to get a cut in order to sell a ticket at the market-clearing rate seems factually incorrect, and therefore the entire posited relationship between artist and Ticketmaster is incorrect.
As far as I understand, Ticketmaster has deals with the most valuable venues in the US such that if you want to perform at the venue, you must use Ticketmaster. It is not that you as an artist choose to use Ticketmaster to inflate your ticket prices for you while deflecting the blame, but rather that if you aren't willing to give Ticketmaster their cut you don't get access to desirable venues at all.
I'm open to correction if someone who is more informed on the topic wishes to chime in, but I would hesitate to take this article at face value. It seems crafted to sell an emotional narrative rather than making accurate observations of reality.
Ignoring the part about your vibes, Ticketmasters business strategy is well covered at this point and it is precisely what you claim it isn't.
It first sells the ticket, that's the money that partially goes to the creator... And then it lets the buyers resell their ticket through it's platform, which you correctly identified as scalping, but that's kinda core to is profit strategy
I'm aware that Ticketmaster supports scalping and profits from it itself. However, the premise of the article is that the artist hires Ticketmaster and profits from allowing Ticketmaster to do this on their behalf. Where is "blame as a service" here, when the reality is that Tickermaster is engaging in rent-seeking behaviour, extracting excess profit solely for its own benefit and not the artist's?
I think the blame as a service is about the exorbitant fees that Ticketmaster charges. I have heard that some of those fees often go back to the artist.
I'd be very interested in a more reputable source than "I have heard". It would make a substantial difference in the validity of the premise of the article, but I can't find anything that suggests this is actually the case other than baseless speculation on forum threads. I've read a lot of Reddit posts asserting that artists are in cahoots with Ticketmaster and not a lot of any evidence. Ticketmaster itself, as well as anything I can find written by journalists, suggests that the artist gets only the face value of the ticket and the fees are shared between Ticketmaster and the venue.
I was told this by people that worked for Ticketmaster. They worked on their software team so they wouldn't have been "in the know" on that kind of stuff, so it's possible they were just extrapolating from the same Reddit posts and articles everyone else is.
I love the rebranding of corporate villainy as “Blame as a Service”; it makes it easier to discuss these sleaze-bags in the open without getting into nitty-gritty technicalities that derail the core conversation.
Also fitting that McKinsey (and by extension, most “business consultancy” companies) get the first shoutout as a prime example of BaaS. Despite lending their support to decades of awful, and at times morally evil decisions, the arrangement allows both business elites and McKinsey themselves to escape blame via simple finger-pointing, the masses largely unaware that said negative outcomes were the goal all along.
To fix broken systems, we must find ways of distilling complex and nuanced topics into simple-to-communicate concepts, vocabulary, and slang. Blame-as-a-Service accomplishes that nicely, and will hopefully allow a redirection back towards the core point of many such discussions: accountability, or lack thereof.
Also UK style outsourcing eg Capita, Serco and recently Tata Consultancy Services fubaring JLRs infra.
The Empty Boat poem comes to mind. Accountability-As-A-Service.
How about the most obvious ones? AWS? Cloudflare outage? I saw nobody get anything other than a grunt this week. Who cares? What can we do? It'll be up when it's up.
I also had a client this week have a physical server catch on fire and burn down everything. Backups don't count when they're in the same room.
The real problem is accountability as a service has never been made for our leaders. Thats the real service they need.
What consulting companies have offered for decades.
Virtual oxytocin drugs.
Excellent article
BaaS, Trump As Receiving Default: BaaSTARD.