Here’s a nasty little thought experiment, for a legal
holiday. Imagine that no one were
allowed to keep self-published material (that is, online, in blogs, in
self-published books, in videos) up and available (and findable by search) to
the public unless it paid its own way with sales.
You can imagine “exceptions” – like social media
posts, but only those that were marked private outside of a pre-selected list
of people that you already know and interact with in the real world. *
I throw out this “modest proposal” (like Jonathan
Swift) as a kind of reaction to the constant calls I get to become aggressive
in “selling”.
I can immediately point to the same dilemma with
newspapers, many of which have put up paywalls, with varying success.
Most scientific journals have mandatory pay, too (and subscriptions are
expensive). And in the past, even the
government tried to support a system that kept some free academic journals away
from the public, leading to the open access debate, started by the tragedy of
Aaron Swartz (PACER should have been free, but not JSTOR) and recently taken up by teen medical innovator Jack Andraka.
But in my own world, the basic moral setup is
something this. People calling have to
make a living (often on commissions). My
“it’s free” idea isn’t fair to them. Other
people have children to raise, mouths to feed.
They didn’t inherit an estate that allows them to coast and do what they
want.
So I should get a taste of the life of a “pimp” and do
the “Hustle and Flow” myself.
That’s not quite accurate in another way. I paid for the self-publishing of my first
book (in 1997) because I found vendors who would do it rather inexpensively,
because I made a good salary in a stable job, had ample savings, and because
those savings had grown substantially in the 90s because the stock market
(under a “Republicrat” Bill Clinton, who was very fiscally responsible himself)
did well. I essentially “invested” stock market gains into the book. Yes, Wall Street matters. Rentier capital matters. It can help you do what you want. (And fiscal responsibility by governments
helps.) All of this happened well before
the eldercare endgame with Mother.
And yes, I don’t have kids. I didn’t procreate. I have no lineage to take
care of me or to replace me. But the
cultural fault lines are appearing, and there are more than just two opposing
sides to this. *
Normally, media projects do have to pay their own way
when they use other people’s money (OPM).
Publicly traded companies have the biggest accountability, and that’s
one reason why the “creativity” behind big Hollywood movies may be entertaining
and dazzling, it’s often not too challenging intellectually, or doesn’t ask too
many questions. Independent movies
still use investor money (often as LLC’s), usually, but usually investors who
are much more interested in a creative message and not as demanding about
returns. Proprietors, like some
self-published book authors and webmasters (me) are relatively free, a lot of
sales hype in recent months and years is eroding that assumption.
My strategy was to put out a morally nuanced, even
ambiguous and perhaps self-effacing theory, at let people find it. Yes, I did sell copies of the book in the
first couple years, reasonably. But gradually, I came to depend on search
engines to find me. This worked very
well from about 1999 until maybe 2008.
Gradually, never forms of social media have eroded that “market”.
There is something alarming to some people about “passive”
marketing like the way I managed it. It
is more likely to be found by people who don’t have the best intentions, the
theory goes. (This could feed into
recent theories about how ISIS is able to abuse social media and use social
leveraging to recruit.) If “I” and
really proud of what I have to say, then I should promote it with conventional
public relations and advertising services, and work on a large scale. I should spend time on sales activity, and
not just on reworking more content.
Historically, there is a twist in all this. I think
the whole strategy I used would not be possible without Section 230, and if
Facebook, Twitter, and to some extent newer Google products hadn’t come along,
we might have much weaker downstream liability protections than we do now. So while Mark Zuckerberg may have taken away
some of my audience, he may have also saved it, and provided a new one.
But imagine a world where you have to “earn the
privilege of being listened to” (ironically, the title of my third book). “You” (or “I” – I get defensive here and use
pronouns impersonally, like in French class) only get heard when other people “want”
or “need” what you have to say. That expands to a personal life, even for a
singleton, based on meeting “the real needs of other people” and, moreover,
letting that mean something to “you”. I
heard a lot of this back in the 1970s in the Rosenfels environment at the Ninth
Street Center in NYC, with a great deal of irony and moral paradox that has
never resolved. There seems to be
another cultural divide in our culture, between people who can “play” in an
individualistic, secularized culture and those who need personalized attention
in a group. But man is a social animal
before he is an individual.
There’s a good question, as to the effectiveness, and
even the ethics, of competing with oneself (e.g., “you can compete with ‘free’”)– putting
it up for sale on Amazon and other sites for those able and willing to pay, but
also giving it away on PDF’s on owned sites or on “free” YouTube videos. I wonder if this is partly what the big media
companies worry about as eroding their market, rather than actual piracy. (Mark Cuban, from Shark Tank, once ratified
that idea in an email to me a few years back.)
So, just moments ago, I played “Flirtation Avenue”
from Timo Andres’s “Shy and Mighty”, an ironic name, from own YouTube channel,
for free (ironically, the link on his website is incorrect!). But, yes, I
played good karma and bought the CD a few years back, as I will with any artist
I want to support (like by going to see his or her film with a normal admission
ticket). (The piece ends loudly.) The meaning behind the “How Can I Live in
your World of Ideas?” (the preceding piece), seems relevant. Ideas alone can be dangerous when they just
lie fallow. But musicians, unlike
bloggers and novelists, don’t have to be that explicit about meaning. Arnold Schoenberg even said that – although opera
and cantatas have a lot of textual meaning that can provoke.
The mockumentary film series (3 8-minute shorts) by
Reid Ewing (known from “Modern Family” and various indie films) starting with “It’s
Free” (starting in an LA library, going to an aquarium and then a courthouse!)
from around 2012 summarize all this beautifully. And unfortunately they aren’t available right
now, as far as I can tell.
Coordinated post on Trademark blog today (also, Books blog on May 24, 2015 and Oct. 16, 2013).
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