It’s no surprise to me that the singer-songwriter Neil Young followed through on his threat to pull his music from Spotify in protest of the Covid misinformation spouted by that streaming service’s brightest star, Joe Rogan.
Young’s move is certainly a grand gesture, but if the goal was to shame Spotify into cleaning up its act, it likely won’t work. There just aren’t enough quality alternatives to force the issue.
Consider Rogan’s own recent power move. He got crabby about Twitter and with great flourish tweeted — yes, the irony is thick — that people should join him over at Gettr, the conservative social media site run by the former Trumpie Jason Miller. But he quickly found Gettr to be lacking, calling the technology there “fugazi” and another word, unprintable here.
It’s largely been more conservative figures doing the “my boots were made for walking” thing about tech platforms, complaining of censorship even as they blatantly and intentionally break the platforms’ rules. And with just a small group of players dominating social media, we can expect such futile acts of rebellion to be repeated.
While speeches about free speech get the attention, we ought to turn our focus on the more interesting debate about the concentration of power in media and tech and on encouraging as many new alternative options to the big players as possible. If we wait for regulators to break up Big Tech, we’ll be waiting a looong time. Basically, if you can’t beat them, bypass them.
A good example this week is the right-wing pundit and Fox News host Dan Bongino’s response to his recent removal from YouTube for clear violations of its terms of service. He was asking for it, literally. As The Times noted: “Mr. Bongino posted a podcast episode titled ‘I’m Daring YouTube to Do This.’ On the show, he pledged to keep posting videos with his claims about masks, and he dared the company to take action.”
Bongino tested YouTube’s resolve by continuing to post misleading videos about Covid, banned under the platform’s misinformation rules.
Now that he’s been booted from YouTube, Bongino has taken his talents to a video-hosting service called Rumble, where he’s an investor. While you may not agree with Bongino’s views — and I usually don’t — this is precisely what people should be doing instead of playing the endless game of chicken with Big Tech platforms that ends the same way and never results in meaningful change. Maybe Bongino’s move won’t work, but we should all welcome real competition in social media.
Which brings me back to Neil Young. Sure, I have all kinds of affection for his artistry, dating from my teenage years, so I want to see him succeed. But the impact of leaving Spotify amounts to just the same old huffery and puffery when there’s nowhere else to run to. Good P.R., no doubt, but it has almost no impact.
Young — and whoever is next — needs to think hard about how he can find other homes beyond the big platforms and support them with the gift of his music and allow his work to last into eternity. After all, I heard, rock ’n’ roll can never die.
4 Questions
I caught up with Mark Cuban, the entrepreneur, Dallas Mavericks owner and “Shark Tank” star, who is now taking on the role of pharmacist (really). He discussed the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, an online outlet that opened this month aiming to offer generic drugs at a deep discount. I’ve edited his answers.
First let me say, I love the name. The drug industry has been notoriously resistant to change, so what prompted you to take on this sector? You’ve said lowering patients’ stress is a goal — why has that not been a goal of Big Pharma?
It started with Daraprim and Martin Shkreli. I figured if he could just bump up prices, we could figure out a way to take them down. In fact, I tried to buy all the Daraprim being made so I could give it away. But there are laws against that. My partner Alex Oshmyansky helped me understand where and how we could bring down pricing with generics. Together, we figured out that it wasn’t cheap or fast to do, but we could create a platform that changed the economics for many generic drugs.
With so many entwined stakeholders with the legacy or start-up companies, it’s really hard to be the low-cost provider, but that is our complete focus. For competitive reasons, other outfits don’t want to be completely transparent with their costs. They want to expand their margins. When we lower our costs, our customers will see our costs and see their price go down. And, we think we can lower our costs even lower than they are now, particularly with the plant we are building in Dallas. Making our own will be great in so many ways, not the least of which is simplicity for our supply chain.
You don’t take insurance but make the point that your prices are often below what those who use insurance pay for their medications. Similar low-cost schemes have been tried by several health start-ups. What is your assessment of the current efficiency of insurance companies?
If efficiency and insurance were synonymous, administering insurance wouldn’t make up 21 percent of health care costs in this country. Every contract between payer and provider is its own silo with its own costs. Cost Plus Drugs is designed to avoid that.
Why have politicians, who talk a lot about bringing down the cost of prescription drug prices, so far been unable to do so? And are you thinking of jumping into a political race by solving a real-world problem?
Jumping into a political race is the one way to not solve any problem. Just like payers and providers put profits first, politicians put getting elected or re-elected first. Nowhere are those goals aligned with those of patients.
Our goal is not to maximize profits, it’s to maximize impact. Our team has been grinding on this for more than three years. It’s not something that just happened overnight. We are not going to be fancy, we aren’t going to do branding campaigns, we aren’t going to have the most advanced artificial intelligence. We know that none of that matters for someone who can’t afford their medicine and has to ration what they do get — or go without something else that is critical. They will take a few extra steps with us in order to be able to afford something that could make the difference between being healthy or sitting in an emergency room
Big Pharma has usually been seen as a villain, but its image has been bolstered by the Covid vaccines. Do you think this is deserved?
Hell, yes. The reality is that they saved millions and millions of lives. They worked together, despite being branded as evil by some. They continue to do the work to try to end the pandemic. I would thank each and every one of them personally if I could.
Bonus, via my editor: When will Seattle get its N.B.A. basketball team back, for goodness’ sake?
I’m trying!
Lovely & Loathsome
Lovely: A year ago, I interviewed Substack’s C.E.O. Chris Best about the initial growth of his breakout newsletter platform, which allows independent writers to reach fans directly via subscriptions. “I think that people are starting to lose trust in some of the institutions that used to have a lot of people’s trust,” he told me. “And they’re looking for alternatives. And with the way that they’ve been choosing to put together their media diet, they’re starting to kind of realize, ‘Hey, this is not actually how I want to choose what to consume.’”
He was talking about text, but now Substack has upped the ante with video in a private beta-launch. While YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Instagram are working just fine for many creators, Substack’s effort is the logical next step of a laudable campaign to encompass more mediums (it introduced a podcast network last year, for instance). As bigger players like Facebook try to eat Substack’s lunch with derivative offerings, I am always on the side of the more nimble and innovative, like Best.
Loathsome: If you were one of the people who in recent months praised the efforts of household names to take at least some of their salary in bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies — including mayors like New York’s Eric Adams and Miami’s Francis Suarez or professional football players Aaron Rodgers and Odell Beckham Jr. — your timing was, to put it lightly, unfortunate. The value of bitcoin has fallen by nearly 50 percent since its high of almost $69,000 in November. But them’s the breaks in the unregulated world of digital tokens. It’s still too risky and volatile a sector for regular people to operate in every day. That will surely change, but as a report in Vox noted, “Taking your salary in cryptocurrency is most analogous to investing your entire paycheck into the stock market — though it’s much, much riskier.”
