Netflix is creating a problem by cancelling TV shows too soon
Bean counters shit up everything. This started in traditional publishing in the 1990s and it&#x27;s responsible for the oppressive mediocrity of the &quot;high literature&quot; scene in the US. Money people never, ever know their place. They don&#x27;t understand that <i>culture</i> is more important than they are, and it shows.<p>It started with the chain bookstores. Used to be, getting in was the hard part, but once a writer got published, he stayed published. His editor would keep supporting his books until he broke out. Chain bookstores wrecked this. They&#x27;d pull an author&#x27;s numbers, see that the first book was a flop, and pass on the second. They also introduced the 8-week rotation, which meant that reader word of mouth (a slower process) got disenfranchised, forcing publishers to pick winners (lead titles) and losers before the books were even launched.<p>This changed the incentive structure. Instead of having to get one person, who knew literature, to believe in his work, an author has to convince a whole committee of people. If the editor can&#x27;t sell the book to the money people, it gets no marketing or publicity and it dies.<p>Then there are the literary agents, who don&#x27;t even read 99 percent of the work sent to them. That&#x27;s done by unpaid college-age interns. So, instead of writing a book readers will love, your focus becomes writing a book that people will think their bosses like. It&#x27;s a totally different game.<p>I&#x27;m not surprised this is happening to Netflix. We tend to have a pro-data bias in technology. We don&#x27;t realize that when the money people get their hands on data, that unless we are extremely editorial in the context in which they interpret and use that data, it&#x27;s going to be a disaster. They don&#x27;t have altruistic motives and they don&#x27;t work nearly as hard as we do to understand complexity-- it&#x27;s best to think of them as a different species.