Neo-Feudal Content Creation
From Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s book, Free:
“Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas [news]paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?
[via The New Yorker]
Or, as it was put at a site called The Awl:
What [Chris Anderson] is proposing is down somewhere, on the scale of ethics, well beneath Wal-Mart’s policies of no longer hiring any full-time workers so as to avoid health and unemployment insurance. It is in fact some weird sort of neo-feudal, post-contract-worker society, in which he will create a dystopian and eager volunteer-slave system of “attention-paid” enthusiasts (which is to say, people with no other options, and no capital of their own) to create products from which rich people can get richer.
This is neo-feudal just like the blood-drinking monster society of Vampire: The Requiem was neo-feudal. Yes, the people at the ground level will continue to produce those things the more lordly need to survive — whether the “content” is crops or writing or blood — but the ones getting rich off that, the vassals who shuttle that content from the serfs to the lords, are all vampires, feeding, feeding, feeding. They keep the serfs fed well enough to labor but hungry enough to fear and love the teat, and like vampires these vassals might fight and fuck but they don’t create. They take advantage of people desperate to be heard. They take.
The notion is that the free economy created when everyone is publishing solely for free, writing just for the privilege of being read, investigating simply for the mad props of being in the know, will be the end of scarcity and that this will be great for the people with the microphones and speakers, who charge people to stand within earshot, and great for the open-mic talent, who write and speak and sing and report in exchange for a turn on stage. What’s unclear here — what’s still scarce in this model — is what these artists are eating and where these journalists are sleeping. How are their bills paid? Can they eat fan mail and send their Google Analytics data to their landlords as rent?
That Chris Anderson is both an editor and an author means that, in this interstitial economy, he got paid both to get others to write and to write his own book. Would you have written it for free, Mr. Anderson? I write for free because I’ve found no value in withholding my work, but if I continue to write for free, and discipline myself, can I be paid as my own motivating force? As my own visionary editor for my own career?
In a response to Gladwell’s review, Anderson wrote a bit about the (generally wonderful) GeekDad blog at Wired:
The other contributors largely write for free, although if one of their posts becomes insanely popular they’ll get a few bucks. None of them are doing it for the money, but instead for the fun, audience and satisfaction of writing about something they love and getting read by a lot of people.
So that’s the difference between “paying people to write” and “paying people to get other people to write”. Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc).
It works great for all involved.
I’m going to take advantage of Anderson’s language here and say this: he notes that a piece of writing would have to be “insanely popular” to warrant paying a writer. Thus he seems to be saying that it’s crazy to pay for writing — only the most over-the-top situation would call for it. His GeekDad model is also based on the notion that writers should be already employed somewhere lucrative, somewhere that doesn’t absorb all of their time, doing something that has real value (i.e. not writing). That his understanding of the process seems no more refined than “somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary” is almost shocking.
People near the bottom often write for free because they have the luxury of doing so or because they are desperate to be heard. Or both. When the possibility of breaking out and writing for a living is taken away, some valuable voices will go in search of other work.
Anderson also argues that passionate amateurs can write better in some areas than trained professionals. I agree. And they’re willing to write for free, which has value to the aggregator, but here’s the rub: If you’re the money-making aggregator, why not pay the amateur?
The Internet audience has indicated that it has a large hunger for that which is free. The consumer is not the only one to have a voice in the determination of value, however. The ability to find free and capable writers is not justification for getting paid for their work. That’s the point.
It is easy and possible to pay writers in pats on the head but it is better to pay them. It is adult. It’s the menschy thing to do.
To be fair, I’ve not yet read Free, so I may be reacting to nothing. (I’m reacting more to Anderson’s reaction, anyway.) But you can bet I’ll be getting this book from the library now, instead of the bookstore.
How much do you want to bet I’ll regret posting this tomorrow?
No, I think you should not regret it. I think you are right.
I’m not so sure I am. The frustrating thing about this debate, though, is that Seth Godin and Chris Anderson seem to be willfully misrepresenting Gladwell’s position and artificially skewing the debate to divide the ready from the unready, the willing for change from the fearful of change.
The thing is, I stand to benefit from the notion of the Free, insofar as I could gain visibility from it — but I don’t want visibility, necessarily. I want respect, sure, but I also want to eat food and have money for travel.
Right now, the venues that Anderson suggests will be providing visibility to writers — places like Wired — have visibility because they have lingering cred from their writers and designers, not just their editors. The magazine offers visibility and money to its print writers, but the visibility it offers to its free writers stems from the cred they derived partly from those free writers. Wired’s big speakers are useless if they don’t have decent talent at the mic, and it’s the talent that made anyone come close enough to hear what comes out of those speakers.
Attention is generated in part by the content creators, but Anderson is advocating selling that same attention back to them in exchange for labor. And my argument isn’t about whether or not it will work, but whether or not it’s good practice. I measure good as something larger than lucrative.
I don’t think the post quite says that.
More to the point, even if I’m right, I may still be screwed. I worked my whole life to be a better writer, but that won’t matter in the Free future, when being a “good writer” will mean writing well, for free, even after a day breaking rocks in a quarry.
The only thing I know is that the argument kind of terrifies me.
Right now, we’re in this place — and this isn’t just writers, this is all content creators — where all the pieces are being thrown blindly in a box. The box is shaken up. And all the pieces are then dumped out on the floor.
We haven’t gotten there yet, so we don’t know the order. We don’t know how it shakes out, and it’s scary to… well, to try to guess. To figure out where you’ll be when the boxpocalypse happens.
A part of me thinks, it won’t matter. Gladwell is right enough. The old ways will transform into new ways that ape the old ways in new ways. Or something. Right now, the Internet is home to a world of free, but not a world of quality, not a world of things worth paying for. People are obviously willing to pay for their entertainment. (The fact that they’re willing to give $200 million to Transformers 2 is equal parts heartening and gut-punching, but at least they’re paying.)
It spawns another fearful, trembling question — are people who give their material away free in the hopes of building an audience through visibility (i.e. us three) doing secret, untold damage to those who want to sell it? Probably not. But it adds up, maybe.
We’ll see. I’m mostly going to keep trundling forward, assuming that it’ll figure itself out and I’ll course correct.
– c.
Course correcting is the thing. We writers, as mostly solitary operators, at least the flexibility to adapt quickly. I intend to take full advantage of that.
Thinking about it today, I’m less bothered by the oncoming future, per se, than I am by seeing a major editor at Wired declare writing ain’t worth money.
That’s the thing. I say, without having read the book (like you), he seemed awfully dismissive toward… well, any career devoted toward writing. Curious, given the fact that he surely wants me to buy his book.
I would bet ten minutes of my attention, but I’m not sure how you would pay me back if I won.
Do I understand you correctly to be saying that, in future, publishers will actually continue to give money to writers, even when they don’t need to, only because it’s the right thing to do? I mean, I don’t doubt that some might, but those who choose to forgo it when they can, will be advantaged by their choice.
If instead you’re expressing a preference, of course we all want folks to make a living, but if Anderson’s predictions happen to be correct, that doesn’t mean he can be blamed for causing them or wishing them to be so.
My interpretation is that Gladwell, like a good newspaperman, elevates the interests of newspapers to philosophical principle; where the technology and culture seem to be going, there’s no newspapers, so the technology and culture must be bad. Whereas Anderson sees a whole slew of free-making developments as inevitable, and his response to the review is just to say it’s not quite as bad as you might think, since people can still have fun writing in the free future. He might have been better served by saying “Well don’t look at me, it’s hardly my fault that things are turning out like this.”
(Trimmed this comment.)
I am not predicting. I am arguing against the need to follow, blindly, market forces toward undesirable outcomes. I’m not saying that Anderson is inaccurate, I’m saying that we can choose, even in the face of Free, not to be so cheap.
What Anderson describes as being like gravity is actually a choice. Wired could have been put together out of articles written by his “passionate amateurs,” writing for free, for many years. There have long been people who want to be published more than they want to be paid. Why hasn’t he made the magazine out of those articles for years?
The Internet just makes it easier for an editor to find a writer willing to work for free. People have been happy to get free writing for years, to publish without paying for years. This is not new. The illusion that it is savvy and not sketchy because it is futuristic — that’s new.
Note that I am aware I may be wrong and that my position may change. I want the debate because I can’t see what I think until I’ve beaten my position against a few rocks first.
Two days later, I don’t think you should feel any regret. I was disturbed by the underlying (and hypocritical) implications of Anderson’s premise, but they didn’t fully crystalize until after I’d read his tepid response to Gladwell, followed by Awl’s Wal-Mart analogy yesterday. If I’d read those BEFORE I wrote my post, it would have been similarly reactionary.
Unfortunately, Anderson’s PT Barnum routine is going to continue to make him a lot of money on the speaking circuit because provocation and hyperbole sells tickets.
Kudos on the thought-provoking post, and thanks for the compliment in the other post.
Thanks for saying so, Guy. I’m glad the debate is expanding. Whether it says good or ill about the future of careers for writers, this debate’s been a great whetstone.
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[...] Neo-Feudal Content Creation a week or two ago, he wrote: The notion is that the free economy created when everyone is [...]