The Filters of Quality Are Gone: Is This Why Quality Has Declined?

You are receiving this essay because you are a patron/subscriber to Of Two Minds / Charles Hugh Smith. This is Musings Report 2024-37.

The insight that physical costs impose a quality filter was shared by my friend Jim E. 

His example was the difference between physical media and digital media: if we have to press vinyl records or print physical copies of books, magazines and newspapers, the costs of production, storage and distribution are high. As Jim put it, "This cost ends up being a substantial barrier to entry.  You had to have a pretty good product to make it economically viable.  This applied not only to music, but to news, films, books, art and advertising. In the digital era, there is no 'filter' for quality."

If we can only press 50 albums or publish 50 books a year, then we have to invest money in sorting through hundreds of bands and thousands of manuscripts to select what we reckon are of a quality high enough to sell enough units to keep our business afloat. The high costs demand careful attention, as each product is make-or-break due to the costs.

This applies to product and labor costs as well. If we operate a shoe store, can we afford to stock low-quality shoes nobody wants or hire an unproductive staff? The higher the costs, the more attention we pay to the quality of our products and work.

In other words, when physical / labor costs impose a quality filter, then the way to make money is to focus on maintaining quality.

What happens when we can drastically lower costs by manufacturing low-quality products overseas? Volume matters more than quality.  Consider a container load of shoes that we bought for an incredibly low price. The price is low because the quality control is shoddy.  Everyone in the supply chain knows we can't return the container of shoddy shoes, so the manufacturer has no incentive to pay attention to quality.  And since our costs are now low, we don't care, either: what matters is selling the containerload of shoddy shoes as quickly as possible. 

In the realm of online / digital marketing, we can game the "customer satisfaction" ratings by paying low-cost overseas labor to post 5-star ratings about the shoddy shoes, and since they're so cheap, consumers trying o save money are easy marks.  If we ship directly from overseas using low-cost labor, our costs are even lower.

In the realm of digital media, the way to make money is to focus on quantity and sensationalization, not quality. The more posts, videos and content we produce, and the more sensationalized our marketing, the more clicks, engagement, "likes" we get, and the more money we make. 

 The incentives are to go around the high barriers to entry by digitizing our market and our labor. We can create and market products digitally for very low costs, and if we automate customer service portals, we no longer have to care about the quality of our workforce: most of the public will give up trying to reach a human employee and put up with the unpaid "shadow work" of dealing with our low-quality "digital assistants" / chatbots.
 
Since putting music and books for sale online is essentially free, there is every incentive to publish hundreds of low-quality books online--either cobbled together from legitimate books or fabricated by AI--as even a few sales to unwary buyers make the venture profitable. The same is true of music and any other digital content.

How do legitimate creators find a market in a rising sea of limitless content and sensationalized marketing?  The temptation is to give up on quality having any influence and focus on marketing, and so we pay a tech monopoly for higher placement or to target a select audience based on users' data.  

Given these dynamics, what incentives are left to pay attention to quality? And since the incentives have eroded or vanished, so too has quality, replaced by quantity and sensationalized / targeted marketing. 

The quickening pace of the bombardment of content, marketing and sensationalization has increased to the point of overwhelming derangement. In the frenzy to make money in this ever-expanding bombardment, we accelerate the pace.

It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

We arrive at a difficult question: what ability to discern quality is left after this bombardment?

As a writer who apprenticed under journalist-editors, my observation is that editing is now too costly for all but the most well-funded institutions, so "editing" is now a software tool that catch grammatical / spelling errors.

Due to its high cost, actual editing--a much more demanding task--is now rare. I'm not sure how many people actually know how to edit for more than error correction. And why should they, given that there's so little money in high-level editing skills when software checks are "good enough"?

The experience of another writer on Substack is instructive. She authored a cookbook and devoted enormous energy to marketing it to publishers.  She was rejected not on the quality of the content but because she lacked a large enough social media presence to sell the book for the publishers.

So she spent a year working hard to build an impressive social media presence, and now her book is under contract.

In other words, publishers no longer have any real marketing reach; they rely on the authors' own social media efforts to sell the books. I doubt they offer much in the way of editing, either.  Their role as "gatekeeper" has shrunk down to their membership in an institutional cartel that controls access to bookstores and catalogs.

You see where this is going. Quality assurance is now too expensive for anything less than a costly iPhone.

Consider the cost-quality filters on labor. If we're hiring someone that we're paying almost as much (or more) than we're paying ourselves, we need to be sure that this employee has the "right stuff" to do quality work, show up on time, leave personal dramas at home, stay focused and remain dedicated to the tasks at hand.

But if we're only hiring gig workers for a few dollars as needed, then how much dedication to quality can we expect? 

Let's consider another quality filter: professional qualification and quality compliance standards.