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We’re only in it for the money – Frank Zappa

Chris Anderson has a new book out July 7th and that appears to have resuscitated the question of “free” as it applies to digital stuff, like news and other content (what use to be known as literature, pop culture, art, music and so on).

The entire idea of “free” content is informed by a belief in inevitability. Like gravity, it is a natural law. No one will pay for anything once it becomes digital – it will be free, and to go against this is to tilt at windmills.

Let’s ignore all that for the moment and ask a different question.

Is free right? Is it morally acceptable to insist that one person work for free while another person, or company, is paid for their work, albeit a different kind of work?

We skirt the moral issue by throwing up our hands and saying it is inevitable, it is the tide, the movement of the sun, and whatever else cannot be changed. “That’s just the way it is.”

Except it’s not. The inevitability here is not the result of physics or nature but of human behavior.

Dichotomies

There are a number of strange dichotomies about this whole idea of free content and its inevitability.

I suppose the first that occurs to me is that on the one hand we feel no obligation, no ethical imperative to pay someone for their intellectual creation (music, news, literature etc.). On the other hand, in this same world, we expect a level of altruism from artists, journalists and others, rather like the Star Trek universe, to do it for the love of it – to achieve our full human potential, as the Federation might have it.

Huh? On the one hand, we don’t feel morally bound to compensate for work but on the other we’re so morally high-minded we don’t seek compensation anyway. Let’s be clear: that is idiotic thinking.

The idea of free that is circulating also conveniently confines itself to the digital world. Once it’s in digital format, it’s free! The problem here is that not all things are digital and, as far as my limited awareness goes, not all things can be converted to digital format. So as long as fossil fuels, trucks, roadies, mother boards, bikes, plates, clothes and so on cannot be digitized, we’ll have to pay for them. We’ll have to pay for the labour that goes into them and we’ll have to pay for the infrastructure that surrounds them.

If you are writer, then, on one hand you will work for no compensation but, on the other, you’ll still have to pay your bills: water, hydro, mortgage, lawn care, clothes, food and on and on. In other words, you have to find other work.

Still, you love writing so much you’ll continue to so, altruistically, in those free moments that you have.

Call it my limited thinking, but that’s horseshit.

I may still write because, yes, I do love it, but I’m certainly not going to bust a hump fact-checking, verifying accuracy, confirming quotes etc. You, the reader, can do that if you’re so inclined but I don’t have the time or energy. I have to wash dishes, walk the dog, and get ready for work tomorrow, the job that pays me so I can pay the bills.

If I’m a musician, I may still make music and even throw it out there to the digital world of free but my real energy and time will be put into marketing, learning how to dance, finding a perfume line, wheedling a way into the world of acting and generally spreading myself very thin in order to make a living at things that actually do pay – as opposed to music, which doesn’t (at least in itself, it has some potential to jumpstart you into something other than music).

Off with their heads!

It may well be that “free” is inevitable. I’ve yet to see any practical arguments for managing the trend, in part because the discussions remain polarized. But I can’t help feeling the discussions are, at their heart, informed by a kind of cultural elitism.

I’ve no doubt things like news, in the traditional sense, will continue (on a much smaller scale) and that there will be people who will, altruistically, create wonderful material on their own, diligently, passionately and creatively. But those people will be (to use a Vonnegut term), the “fabulously well-to-do.” They will be largely a group that can afford the time and lack the need for significant compensation.

It won’t be done by some schmo making minimum wage at three jobs in order to pay the bills. It won’t be done by a single parent with an average income.

It will be done by people who have the time and the means to do so. An elite.

To greater or lesser degrees, an attitude not unlike the famous line, “Let them eat cake,” is taken when some react with alarm at where the trend may be taking us. The fear I have is that that attitude often leads to a counter, antagonistic attitude of, “Off with their heads!”

There is a divide and it is widening. Those who have, will have more. Those who don’t, will have less. It all reminds me of something Gore Vidal said back in the 1970s: “Welfare for the rich; free enterprise for the poor.”

It’s not exactly the same, of course, but the division is similar. Large corporations will make oodles of money because, to put it in old 20th century terms, they own the means of production (the servers, tools, the access etc.). And those who provide the actual material that makes all of that of value, will get less and less, until it is the inevitable “free.”

There will be unrestricted capitalism for some; the Star Trek world of personal nirvana, no need for money, for others.

No, it does not make sense. And I think it comes down to a morally unsound attitude of free for some, not free for others. Some get paid, some don’t.

And that’s just wrong. And as it all evolves it reminds me of Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold …

Note:

This is NOT a commentary on the Chris Anderson book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.” I have not read it so I obviously can’t comment on it. For all I know, I would agree with it one hundred percent. I have, however, read the review of it by Malcolm Gladwell (which I found interesting, to say the least).

This post is about my sense of the discussions online and elsewhere surrounding the whole notion of “free” and about how we appear to view it, how we behave and what I think informs much of it.

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It seems ironic but the very companies that provide methods of communication on the Internet manage communication terribly. We see it time and again.

The latest is Twitter and changes they made in how Reply works. For a good summary of it, see Dave Winer’s Lessons from the changes in Twitter.

Whether the changes were significant or not, and whether the community response was warranted, is irrelevant to my point. This is about how the company communicates with its community.

Most people are aware of the ongoing problems Facebook has in interacting with their community. An example would be their latest redesign and prior to that the fiasco over their terms and conditions.

And there was the recent Amazon “Oops!” (See my post, Lessons learned from the Amazon kerfuffle.)

You’ve got to ask, “Why do they communicate so badly?” You would think that if any companies would be aware of the need for transparency and of how quickly even the smallest thing can spread like wildfire online, these would be the companies. You would also think that they would be would be standards for other companies to go by in how to communicate with your community.

But they’re not. They’re dumb as stumps.

Why? Honestly, I can’t figure it out.

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There have been a few interesting things on the web, particularly on Twitter, that I’ve found intriguing. It’s probably the cultural/societal aspects that have caught my imagination.

For instance, there is the Susan Boyle thing (#susanboyle on Twitter), the woman who appeared on Britain’s Got Talent and seems to have fascinated and delighted everyone. Unemployed, age 47, she surprised everyone by singing the pants off of I Dreamed a Dream. (Good grief! She’s got her own web site now!)

Today, there has been a great deal of buzz on Twitter about reaching a million followers, which I find utterly uninteresting, but also about Oprah getting on Twitter, @oprah – and yes, she’s there. I don’t care one way or the other about her being there, but the interest was a bit fascinating. And the best tweet? It did not come from Oprah but was a response to her first tweet:

@BrentO: HI @OPRAH. WELCOME TO TWITTER. YOU CAN TURN YOUR CAPS LOCK OFF NOW. EVEN THOUGH THERE’S A LOT OF US, YOU DON’T HAVE TO YELL.

Well, it made me laugh.

Also interesting, though more serious (albiet with a dash of humour tossed in) was Nick Carr’s blog post, Hashmobs, a response to the recent Amazon kerfuffle. He concludes with this:

Fortunately for Amazon, a “long time” in realtime is equal to about five minutes in clock time. Being beaten with the virtual pillows of a hashmob may not have been pleasant, but it’s not going to cause the company any permanent, or even passing, harm. It was a tempest in a tweetpot, a ripple in the stream.

I loved the phrase, “tempest in a tweetpot.” I’m not sure, however, that I agree with him about the seriousness (little, he suggests).

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I can save you some reading and get straight to my point: we fear conspiracies when what we should fear is human error.

Now that the fiasco with Amazon is fading from our top-of-mind awareness, it strikes me that there are a few things to be learned from it. Some for us; some for Amazon.

For us, I think the main one is: Something isn’t true just because you want it to be. And with an issue such as the one that occurred, you don’t rely on what a “Members Services representative” says because they are likely as much in the dark as you are. You head up the chain and get an official response.

For Amazon, when you don’t know, say so. Calling a balls-up like the vanishing of gay-lesbian titles from their lists and rankings a “glitch” merely adds fuel to the fire. The correct response is, “We are as alarmed as our customers. Currently, we don’t know what happened. It appears to be a technical issue. We’re working around the clock to identify what the problem is and where it lies and are dedicated to fixing it as soon as possible. We’ll be keeping our customers informed of our progress along the way and apologize to them and to those authors whose works have been affected.”

Or something like that. Better still would to have been really blunt and state that Amazon is a business and would not deliberately risk sales and the possibility of bad publicity that could affect their revenue.

The other lesson for Amazon, I think, is to accept that you can’t be all things to all people. You have to make some choices. Tweaking algorithms and tags and so on to keep everyone happy is risky because it makes something complex even more so.

It should also be a reminder to everyone that our reliance on technology is a precarious one. Think of all the pages of code in all the world’s systems and how many characters those pages include, the asterisks, backslashes, forward slashes and words and rules and consider how easily one character could be wrong, one input mis-typed or mis-entered, and how that smallest of things can affect something like an Amazon, a Google, an eBay and all the others. How about bank sites and your finances? Your taxes?

It actually amazes me that there aren’t more screw-ups given how much code, how many characters, how many true-false statements make the world work today. It’s pretty astonishing.

It’s also something worth thinking about.

Update #1:

This is why the Amazon kerfuffle and #amazonfail are important: Clay Shirky, ‘The Failure of #amazonfail.’

Update #1:

Exacerbating this issue is Amazon’s communications. I see nothing on their home page referring to this. They have an Amazon Daily Blog that I found with absolutely no reference to the fiasco, just marketing rubbish. Why are they not in a dialogue with their customers? Why are they letting everyone else do the talking out on the Internet and not engaging their customers in a discussion?

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On Tuesday I posted Reasons to think Kindle. It was basically a quick look at Kindle from a practical viewpoint because of problems I’m having with my left hand.

But yesterday I came across a commentary titled Kindle e-reader: A Trojan horse for free thought, a look at what Kindle and similar e-readers might mean (and by extension just about everything available digitally). I recommend reading the commentary regardless of whether you agree or disagree with what is argued.

One of the main reasons I found this piece interesting was the sentence, “In our rush to adopt new technologies, we have too readily surrendered ownership in favor of its twisted sister, access.” I hadn’t really considered the difference between owning and access.

Is what we “buy” actually a purchase of something, or is it really a variation on rental because, what we really have, is access? And if it is access, does it matter?

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I’ve finally found reasons to consider e-books, Kindle and the like. I’ve never disliked devices for reading on a screen. I was never one of those people who ranted about the barbarity of the idea of words being on something other than paper, but for reading of a bit more depth and serenity, I preferred a book. The paper thing. Until now.

Reason #1: Two things converged for me recently. One is the book I’m currently reading, A. Lincoln, a recently published biography of Abraham Lincoln by Ronald C. Jr. White. It’s 816 pages and ships, according to Amazon, at a weight of 1.2 Kg. (It’s hardcover.) The other thing is my left hand. I’ve no idea why, but it hurts – more or less constantly, though to varying degrees depending on the day. I don’t know if it’s sprained, a rheumatic problem or what.

Put together, these two things mean simply holding the book as I read is difficult – painful, even. That’s never been a problem before. Not only would I never have considered a heavy book an issue, I may even have enjoyed it. But not now. I’m making my way through the book at a snail’s pace largely because it’s difficult to read due to my hand.

Reason #2: As I’ve written before, I recently picked up an iPod Touch. One of its features is its ability to provide me with viewing options: choose portrait or landscape orientation, enlarge text with a tap. It’s actually easy to read (at least for me). While it still may not be easy for everyone, this ability removes one of the barriers to reading on a handheld device – it’s too small, who can read that? You’ve heard those arguments. (It also has a larger screen than cell phones in the past have had. I think most handheld devices are like this now as more and more manufacturers copy Apple’s iPhone.)

Of course, I live in Canada and as far as I know Kindle is still unavailable here. I don’t know the “why” for this but I believe it has something to do with copyright issues and so on. For the purposes of this post, my point is that I’ve not actually seen a Kindle “in the flesh” so to speak. I’ve never held one to get a tactile sense of it, which I’d like to do since reading, for me, is not just visual but tactile as well.

But according to Amazon, a Kindle is, ” …10.2 ounces, lighter than a typical paperback.” That would certainly make reading A. Lincoln an easier task for me. I think it’s about one tenth of the weight.

My hand would be grateful.

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I was looking at Amazon’s newest notion, Windowshop.com, a new site for … well, window shopping online. I went there and did the usual rolling of the eyes. A lot of online flim-flam, multimedia falderal with little substance.

I get annoyed online because so many companies, certainly their marketing departments, continue to think that pretty pictures and so on, with little actual information, are better than informing the consumer and engaging in a conversation.

I still think that. I wish corporations would take a cue from successful blogs which, in most cases, depend on text and actually interacting with their visitors.

But …

While giving a few moments to Windowshop in order to see what it was, I came across the movie, on DVD, The Visitor. And now I’m going to track it down and buy it after watching the trailer.

So I guess it works. On the other hand, I live in Canada and went to Amazon.ca to see if the movie was available and what that the price might be. Well, the price is too high. I’m pretty sure I’ll find it cheaper elsewhere. I can even wait a bit and possibly get it as a previously viewed DVD at an even lower cost.

In that sense, it didn’t work. But that has little to do with the site and more to do with the pricing.

But back to Windowshop … I’m skeptical. Maybe it will catch on. But like Microsoft Office and it’s redesign that goes against what people are use to in programs like Word, which is frustrating and requires changing long established habits and demands oodles of time to figure out how to do the simplest things (and by default saving files in a format only Word 2007 can open), the Windowshop site has some curious navigation. You can get use to it pretty quickly but, as with all things Flash, it has quirks which can be annoying.

Maybe it’s me. I find Flash to be user-unfriendly. To me, Flash is pretty but clunky and slows everything down. And I’ve never understood why it’s popular.

Is that just the luddite in me?

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