Ian Harvey 1
The internet is a great environment to automate many aspects of our life and to make our lives
easier. While the internet started as just an entity for distributing information and science, capitalism
had a revolution on the internet and now, extraordinary amounts of money are being dealt with.
Because of all of this money, there is also a huge amount of bureaucracy dealing with world wide web.
From music and movies, to videogames, tv, and the news, companies are controlling what is put where,
and how it is put there. In general, the internet has had an enormous impact on our society, but the
bureaucracy behind it has, in some cases, grown instead of shrinking.
The area where this is most prevalent is the entertainment industry where the internet has
generated huge piracy groups and antipiracy corporations. Also, while the need for stuff like CD
manufacturers has gone down a lot, the groups that produce different artist’s music still exist. On top of
that, now there are huge corporations like iTunes that are out there to distribute the music. So now,
instead of the music going from the artist to the producer to the consumer, it goes from the artist to the
producer to the distributor to the consumer. This means that, while the consumers are able to more
easily access music, the faster distribution has led to more bureaucracy.
This does not mean that the internet has constrained our ability to release media though. Many
people and groups are being discovered by the world because of the internet. Websites like Youtube
seem to demonstrate this fact the best. Groups like Smosh, Bo Burnham, and hundreds, if not thousands
of viral videos have been able to reach audiences in the millions because of how easy Youtube makes it
to upload and view other people’s videos. In spite of this fact, many of the groups that get a start on
Youtube eventually get taken over by some kind of bureaucracy. This is just the nature of bureaucracy.
They take care of large amounts of money and they are relatively exclusive.
The exclusivity of bureaucracy makes eliminating them using the internet somewhat impossible.
If an entertainment bureaucracy were to be automated by the internet, I believe that it would fail. This
Ian Harvey 2
is essentially because bureaucracies are run by humans. The human aspect of a bureaucracy conveys
emotion and deals with problems in ways that a computer could not. Sure you could make a program
that looks at your music, your beliefs and everything to personalize your bureaucracy, but that doesn’t
seem like it would work to me. If our programming ability was good enough to make a ‘Eharmony’
knock-off that had enough artificial intelligence to advertise and use money in ways that you want it to
be used, then we would pretty much be at the point where our programming was good enough to make
computers make the music for us. Furthermore, if the advertisements and concerts that a music artist
made were directed by a program’s calculation, then having a bureaucracy would be less expensive and
everyone that had enough money and thought they had talent could essentially have an administration
behind them. In short, we need bureaucracy to be controlled by humans and to be as slow as it is
because, if it became as automated as the music distribution system online, then it would be too easy to
access and, in most cases, not much better than what we currently have.
While the entertainment industry would be very difficult to extract bureaucracy from, the news
industry is already starting to die out on television stations. We haven’t gotten to the point where news
stations are shutting down, but there is less actual news during the day and the bureaucracy is actually
doing very bad things for this industry. However, many online news sources exist and thrive. Basically
every internet service provider has a huge amount of news on their main page, many blogs are
dedicated to news, be it local or global, and all newspaper companies and news stations have a great
deal of their stories online. The news industry has already jumped to the internet and is totally self
sustainable now, in spite of this, the television news industry is clinging on so that the people involved in
those stations don’t lose their jobs.