Early on, America took one path and went down the advertising road, and in the UK they founded the BBC and developed a different kind of public broadcasting. There was a point where TV was so beholden to commercial interest that people - civil society - actually rose up and said, "This is ridiculous: we have our soap-selling soap operas, cigarette-sponsored news broadcast; we have our rigged quiz shows - let's put some checks and balances here."
Astra TaylorBasically political economy - that you have to look at how funding structures shape the media landscape. You have to look at commercial interests, consolidation - the economy structures are experience.
Astra TaylorI work for free all the time, as a writer but also as an activist. The decisions we have to make as individuals are really fraught but also can be really wonderful and we're all navigating this reality to the best of our abilities. But, again, I wanted to take a step back and look at the broader context.
Astra Taylorulturally, we are definitely seeing people being to ask hard questions. There's been a major shift over the last year. The NSA revelations played a big part but there are all sorts of other issues too, like inequality and gentrification in the Bay Area, and labor abuses everywhere from Amazon's warehouse, to Apple's factories, to start-ups like Uber and TaskRabbit.
Astra TaylorWe like to say the Internet is the ultimate library. But libraries are libraries because people come together and fund them through taxes. Libraries actually exist, all over the country, so why is it such a reach to imagine and to someday build a public institution that has a digital aspect to it? Of course the problem is that libraries and other public services are being defunded and are under attack, so there's a bigger progressive struggle this plays into.
Astra TaylorI'm interested in the way the whole cultural landscape can shift over time. Okay, this will seem like a silly example, but look at the whole discourse around "selling out," a concept people say is irrelevant because there's no more distinction between mainstream and underground, inside and outside (which I don't really believe, but that's another issue).
Astra Taylor