We're all born left wing. Understanding nothing about ourselves or the world, weak, illiterate, inarticulate, completely selfish, unable to care for even our most basic needs, and unable to communicate except by crying.

What on earth do you mean "can't explain it". It's obvious. The publishing industry is serving them garbage, and ninety-five out of one hundred indie authors is a hack with delusions of adequacy. New authors can't find readers. Readers can't find new authors. They are hidden from each other by a whirling snowstorm of trash. This problem is fixable. Hell, I could fix this problem in two hours if I could get @JeffBezos to lock Kindle's senior management in a room with me and not let them out until they really listened. It works like this. Tradpub, in the 20th century, provided a variety of services for authors. For readers, it provided one important service. Curation. Publishers were investors. They invested money in manuscripts and authors, so they vetted those authors and manuscripts for what they thought people would actually read. The system worked. If you picked up a science fiction novel from a major science fiction imprint like DAW or ACE or Baen, there was a risk it might not be to your taste, but it wouldn't totally suck. Well, the tradpub business model is dead. There's no longer any point for new authors in getting a publishing deal, because they can't do anything for you that Amazon doesn't. They add no value. As an author, Amazon provides me what publishers once did.... a store to sell my books, and a press to print them. What they don't do is provide readers the service that publishers once did. They don't vet or curate novels. Why would they? They sell every novel ever, and putting up an Amazon page for your novel costs them less than a dime. You're the one doing most of the work. They have no financial interest in rejecting anyone ever, because unlike tradpub houses, Amazon is not an investor. They have no skin in the game. Now, there's a tradpub word for the unfiltered, unvetted, uncurated output of everyone who wants to be a novelist. They call it the slushpile. And their job, back when they actually used to do it, was to strain the slush for tiny flakes of gold. Now, Amazon, who replaced them, doesn't do that. Amazon just exposes readers directly to the slushpile. Now, about this moment, you might think I am complaining how a large corporation, or a billionaire, isn't fixing my problem for zero dollars. After all, we just got done spelling out that Amazon sells all the books. Why would they have any interest in promoting one over another? Well, that's where they're wrong. This occurred to me when I was writing my first novel. I happened to mention this project to a acquaintance who was highly placed at Amazon, and he told me it was a bad idea. "The book market is saturated," he said. "We get a lot of data from people's Kindle devices, and we know what they have on them, what they have read, what they haven't and how fast they read. These people have an average of five years of unread fiction on their devices. The demand simply isn't big enough to support more supply." I nodded, and smiled, and said "how interesting", and didn't argue. But in my head, at that moment, I invented an idea I call the Thiel Fallacy: the belief that because monopolies have no competitors, they have no competition. Amazon, as an entity, was effectively bored with books, because they were convinced that, as the only game in town, they were selling all the books that could be sold. That they were selling as many books as people would read. A monopoly does not automatically have 100% of the potential market. It must compete with all of its opportunity costs, including non-consumption. In plain English, if you sell all the books there are, but people can't find a book they like, they're going to just chose not to read a book. Amazon was competing with nothing, and losing. If people have five years' untold novels on their ebook reader, this not mean they have too much stuff to read. It means they have not enough stuff that they want to read. If people could go on Amazon anytime they wanted, and easily buy a book they liked, they would have zero unread material on their Kindles, not five years' worth. So why can't people find a book they like? Because no one is sorting through the slushpile. It's just all being dumped on the readers. Imagine a store that sells everything in the universe, but it's all just dumped in a big pile. No one will buy anything, because no one can find anything. Amazon is like this. It gets an A+ at delivering you the book you ordered, but a D- at helping you find the book you want. So am I saying that Amazon should start rejecting books? Should build a whole publishing department and start reading the slushpile and rejecting things? No. Curation was just how tradpub helped readers find books they liked. It's not the only way or even the best. Amazon has data. Amazon has data from book sales. Amazon has data from Kindle. Amazon has giant computational clusters. Amazon has transformer AI technology. Amazon could build the best and most infallible book-reader matchmaking service in the history of the known universe. Omniscient, content-aware, and personalized. Then Amazon would sell more books. If you control 70% of the total book market, you don't sell more books by increasing your market share. You sell more books by increasing the size of the market. Right now, Amazon sells advertising. To authors. How retarded is that? Authors don't have money. If we did, we wouldn't be writing books and making a couple of dollars a sale. Instead, Amazon needs to advertise books for free. Not just the books that sell the most, but individually targeted marketing of the books each person would most enjoy. You don't even have to ask people which books they liked. They don't have to rate them from 1 to 5. Just look at the Kindles. Look at how fast they read it. Did they stay up until 2am reading The Hobbit? Okay, what else did people who stayed up late reading The Hobbit stay up to read? Build a correlation database. Turn AI lose on it. It should be Amazon's job, not the just the authors', to find readers for books. Because authors may be motivated, but Amazon has the data, and the eyeballs, and the money. They could single-handedly revitalize publishing, they'd make more money, authors would make more money, and readers would love them for it. All winners, no losers. All it would require is a development team, and an understanding of what the real problem is. Amazon's enemy isn't Kobo or Barnes and Noble. It's apathy.

This isn't crazy at all, it's just outside of most people's experience. You just have to supply the relevant information, so people can understand. Here, I'll do it myself. (You should pay me more for this.) Picture a jar. Not a special jar that I have to explain to you. Just an ordinary jar. Put some gold in it. Just a little bit, ground to the consistency of fine sand. Now some iron. And some uranium. Don't worry, it's not very radioactive in this state. You can touch it with your hands. Just pour it in. Now some tungsten. Surprisingly heavy, huh? Some platinum. Then just keep adding other heavy elements. Sticking to the useful ones. Should be pretty easy. They're all useful for something. Jar about half full? Now pour in some really fine sand. Put a lid on it. Now shake the jar for 4 billion years. Don't worry, it's just an imaginary jar, and an imaginary 4 billion years, you're not going to get bored or anything. Now reach your fingers into the jar, and fish out a nugget of gold, or tungsten, or iron. Oh, wait. You can't. It's all at the bottom. Under a thick layer of sand. Can you picture it? Are you picturing it clearly? Close your eyes if it helps. Wait, no, open them again so you can read this. That jar is Earth. All the heavy stuff has sunk to the core. Where you can't get it. Now smash the jar on the floor, and pick up the precious metals and the useful ones.... easy, right? The smashed jar is asteroids. Right now, your brain is saying "Oh, I see, he's talking about asteroid mining. He's saying we're going to go out and mine asteroids." No. I'm saying we already are. When the Earth was molten, all the heavy stuff sunk to the core. We covered this. So how are we mining heavy stuff on Earth right now? The answer is that we are mining asteroids. We are mining asteroids that hit the Earth after it stopped being molten. So the stuff in them stayed on the surface. Pretty much every mine on Earth is an ancient asteroid strike. Now think of all the asteroids in the solar system. Divide them into two categories. The first category is the ones that have already hit Earth, sometime in the past. The second category is the ones that haven't. I'll save you the trouble of asking an AI. The first category is about .001%. The second is about 99.999%. Everything you have, everything you own, everything you ever made, everything that your entire civilization is made out of, unless it's made of wood or entirely out of light elements.... it all comes from that .001%. The 99.999% is out there in the rest of the solar system. Now do you understand? You, and I, and Elon Musk, and your sweet old granny, all of us, we grew up under conditions of grinding material poverty. We just don't see it that way because we have nothing else to compare it to. We're used to it. Are you starting to get the idea? Good, but we're not done yet. Now we're gonna talk about energy. Here on Earth, we pull hydrocarbons out of the ground and burn them for energy. We could build fission reactors, but dumbass hippies made some movies, and now the retarded theater kids who run our government won't let us do that. They want us to go back to windmills, because they are retarded. Windmills suck. Hell, even hydrocarbons suck. Fission is okayish, but the real energy source, the only one that matters in the long run, is hydrogen fusion. On Earth, we can't really build fusion reactors that actually produce energy, despite the best efforts of engineers. That's not because the engineers are dumbasses like the theater kids. No, engineers are smart. They still can't do it because it's really really hard, unlike running a government. Perhaps someday they'll succeed, but in the meantime, we're stuck burning hydrocarbons, until we hang all the theater kids and build fission plants instead. But in space, there's a giant free fusion reactor waiting for us. In fact, we've been using it for millions of years. We call it the "sun". In space, energy is free. Oh, you have to invest in some solar panels, and they're only useful close to a star, but that's just nitpicky little details. Basic idea is that there's no power bill. Build solar panels once, run 'em almost forever. On Earth, solar panels suck, and they're only useful for grid independence. But in space, with nothing between you and the star but, well, space, then solar panels are awesome. And all the material and energy you need to build them is right there for the taking. So, cheap material, free energy. What else does a civilization need? Computation? Well, guess what you can build a lot of with cheap material and free energy. What this really all boils down to is that the only thing Earth has going for it is that it's a really nice place to build your house. It's a crappy place to build a mine or factory. The total value of everything off Earth — and I'm just talking about the solar system, not the rest of the universe — exceeds the total value of everything on the Earth by eleventy-billion percent. In the future, most of us will continue to live on Earth, unless we really screw it up by not hanging all the theater kids. But all the mining, all the manufacturing, all the making the stuff, and all the making the stuff that makes the stuff, will happen in space. And there will be a lot more of it. All we have to do is get the tools we need from down here where we built them, to up there where we need them. So that we can build more tools out there, more and more and more of them, forever. There's only one snag. It's really hard to get things off Earth. We haven't really done much of it until very very recently. SpaceX is the "very, very recently". SpaceX now owns about 80% of humanity's lift-to-space capacity, and no one else is even close. That's 80% of the pipeline to infinite wealth. And first dibs on all the real estate out there, too. In the old West, the railroads were money trees, because they didn't just own the transport, they owned the destination. And there's about to be a frontier again, except this one's bigger, and it comes with a built-in second industrial revolution. Make sense now?