Down with the Gatekeepers

Rex Woodbury on how the internet removes the intermediaries who used to decide what got made.

Why it was kept

The excerpts run from the rejected-Pulitzer-winners experiment and the rejection counts of Catch-22, Dune and Harry Potter, through Barry Diller’s 2005 line that there is not much talent in the world, to the argument that platforms like YouTube and Substack are part of a systemic restructuring of how value flows. Kyle filed it with Ben Thompson’s older essay on the same idea, both under #Gatekeepers.

As Kyle captured it

• Down with the Gatekeepers by Rex Woodbury #Gatekeepers
  • Much of society’s architecture is built around gatekeepers, the intermediaries who capture most of the value. This piece is about how gatekeepers are being circumvented and rendered moot.
  • A few years ago, some clever person submitted Pulitzer Prize-winning books to publishers as new manuscripts. Every single book was rejected. The takeaway was clear: barriers to creation are so great that even acclaimed masterpieces, when disguised, don’t make the cut.
  • Other great works almost never saw the light of day. Catch 22? 22 rejections. Dune? 23 rejections. The Help? A whopping 60 rejections. Harry Potter is the bestselling book series in history, with 500 million copies sold; it’s the 3rd-most-read book of all-time after The Bible and China’s Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. But JK Rowling was rejected by 12 publishers.
  • What’s so groundbreaking about the internet is how it reorients the system, obfuscating gatekeepers and unlocking creation.
  • “I am emphasizing the self-service nature of these platforms (AWS, Fulfillment by Amazon, and Kindle Direct Publishing))because it’s important for a reason I think is somewhat non-obvious: even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say “that will never work!” And guess what—many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.” Jeff Bezos
  • I often point to Barry Diller’s infamous words from a 2005 interview in WIRED.
    • “There is not that much talent in the world. There are very few people in very few closets in very few rooms that are really talented and can’t get out. People with talent and expertise at making entertainment products are not going to be displaced by 1,800 people coming up with their videos that they think are going to have an appeal.” Barry Diller
  • But Diller couldn’t have been more wrong. The same year he said those words, a company called YouTube was founded in a tiny room above a pizzeria in San Mateo. It turned out there were many people, in many closets, in many rooms with incredible talent. It just needed to be unlocked.
  • Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, writes on his personal website: “I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard [the maker of the game] removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring.” #Decentralization
  • We’re experiencing The Great Realignment, a systemic restructuring of how economics flow. That said, every era of the web has promised to remove gatekeepers—and yet, each era orbits around nuclei of centralized power. Web2 gave us user-generated content, but profits flowed to Facebook, to Google, to Twitter, to Snap.
  • Innovative tech companies continue to remove middlemen and broaden access. Substack, for instance—the platform on which I’m writing this—removes gatekeepers. I don’t need permission from a publication or approval from an editor to share this piece.
  • The pendulum of society swings towards more fair and efficient systems. So much of society’s value is vacuumed up by people in the middle. If you think from first principles, is that the best construct for value creation and distribution? Across sectors—in worlds as different as media and finance—we’ll see middlemen disappear in favor of direct connections and transfers of value.