On 2009-02-26, SteveC <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Feb 26, 11:57 am, Dana Paxson <[email protected]> wrote: > > What a wild thread this is! But it hits at a huge problem any artist or > > creator has to face: How do I get an appropriate reward for my creative > > efforts? > > > Yep. > > But I'm going to throw in another huge topic. The future. Ever since > the 19th century spawned a whole literature of future utopias people > have argued, sometimes convincingly, sometimes not, for running the > world in a fundamentally different way than the present. (They got > this, just as writers always have, from the morning headlines, > specifically discussions of Communism and Socialism replacing > Capitalism, but I'm going to ignore that.) > > The one thing that Utopians and their successors always left out was > the messy transition. How did a society, with society's massive > inertia and legacy problems, change over from the present day to the > future that presumed universal change down to its very roots?
To be fair, a lot of distopians left that stuff out, too. By which I mean they understimate our ability to muddle through and put up with crap. Which is one of the things that's so beutiful about the original cyberpunk visions and their spiritual/literary antecedents (I think of Delaney as one, for example): Their world is one of gradual, not wholesale, transitions. It takes account of the fact that there are still people out there using party line phones and heating their homes with non-trendy old-style woodstoves. (Not even getting into what life's like in Lagos or the Favelas of Brazil.) You see this in current arguments from those who want to get rid of > our suburban sprawl and replace it with tight-knit cities dependent on > mass transit. How do you get there from here? How do you compensate > the 60% of America whose current choices would be devalued by removing > cars from the equation? People who love trains are really attached to their trains. I've found it's not a good idea to point this kind of thing out around idealists, because they'll just peg you as an anti-visionary, a dream-killer, and you lose the ability to continue to engage with them. Ever talk with anyone about the Charlotte trolley? I knew one of the guys who was initially pushing that. He insisted they could get it *running*again for $500K. This was the same guy who said they could turn the HoJack into a restaurant for $200K. So some of this is just self-deludedness. I find it hard to sort out where that ends and where the structural misunderstanding begins. The world in which the argument technology exists and everybody has to > let it roll over them is like those. In a future world content will be > produced in a different payment model than today. It can't be expected > that those who developed their business plans for the current business > model will abruptly drop the any more than Microsoft has dropped all > its DOS from the OS I'm using, no matter how much theoretical sense > such a change might make. And why: that's important! The "why" isn't technical (and I suspect you'd agree), it's social. (I don't actually think it's even economic, at least not primarily. But that would be another discussion for another time.) Nor are other industries' transitions proof that technology triumphs > over all. Amen. Technological solutions as such hardly ever do well. I'm writing this backward, so "the street puts technology to its own uses" is a sentiment applicable to both this and to what I've just written and you haven't read yet. Imusic is a better business model than Napster. Hulu makes > more money than YouTube. People will pay for content, if the price is > right and the delivery mechanism is right. Taking and putting it out > for free has changed industries but hasn't broken them, because > content has value. Content owners will fight for that value and find > acceptable ways to extract payments. As they do every day. But the deth knell of "free content" has been sounded prematurely so many times that I have a hard time crediting it, whoever is predicting it. Back in the late '90s, everyone who thought they were clever was preducting the iminent demise of online advertising. But it's still there and stronger than ever. "Banner ads don't work," they cried -- but they actually did, even as everyone claimed they didn't. Gawker Media's whole business model is predicated on advertising, and they're doing quite well, thank you. As for margins: I don't actually know precisely what the margins are, right now, but I do have the sense that they're small. I also know that big media firms make nice revenue streams off online advertising. (Margins are so narrow at the low end of the food chain that my company has a hard time making money off it online ads we get our clients into them. We have to approach it as a strategic need and justify it that way. Need fierce economies of scale or really low overhead, preferably both -- but then, that's what technology is good for: Improving your economies of scale and reducing your overhead.) It's not that fight that is self-defeating, it's the taking for free > fight that is. People will strike back when their possessions are > stolen. In the long run, even on the Internet, the thieves have been > the ones to lose. So who are the "thieves"? Do you take the view espoused by many on the commercial side that any attempt to subvert systems of commerce is theft? I'm assuming not. Just pirates? Or Amazon, too? Point being: "Thief" is a strong word with strong connotations, and it means very different things to people in different parts of this very large debate. A less value-laden and more precise term might be helpful. To be fair, "taking for free" is not really the model that most thinkers in this space are interested in. "Giving for free", is. E.g., if you make your work available for free (as you've done), that's "giving for free." Most of the people who have really radical stuff to say about what form publishing (of anything) is going to take, think that it's the "giving" model that matters. The "taking" model -- theft, piracy, whatever you want to call it -- is simply something that makes the "giving" model more effective. As for fighting back when their possessions are stolen: When we move into the digital realm, the concept of "possessions" becomes very problematic, because it's possible to create infinite copies of a "possession" without degradation in quality. I'd argue that it's even possible to make a very large number of copies without degradation in value. It all depends on two factors: How value is *measured*: Do you measure it in purchase revenue, or in terms of implicit revenue? (See following.) How value is *realized*: The argument in favor of the "giving" model has always been that it generates ancillary business. That business may be in the form of sales -- Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross both argue that they've probably realized sales increases due to free-giving -- but more likely it's in the value of opportunities you'd not have, or woudl have fewer of, without having your product out there. It's a really old idea. Old forms I can cite include the free distribution of Book of Mormon or Gideon Bibles, or the free or at cost distribution of books as a means to promote the services of an expert or products of a company. (See this in software all the time. I can turn around and look at a cheap copy of Luke Wroblewski's Site-Seeing that I got as a gimme for a seminar I went to last year, and I have a couple of Seth Godin books I've picked up that way. Seth's kind of the poster-child for this kind of stuff, really.) The future of books will be different. The transition will be messy. > The result will be a compromise in ways that probably no one is > predicting. What I guarantee it won't be is what would happen if you > wiped the slate clean (what a hoary obsolete cliché that is - and yet > we still understand it!) and created the new system from scratch. On this, I heartily agree. SF writers AFAICS are not very good at accounting for inertia, either social or economic (other futurists are as bad or worse, though, to be fair). One of the attractive things about the cyberpunks was that they seemed to get that a little more right than folks who'd come before. I think it had to do with many of them having more experience in the underclass. I suspect that if you look at the older-line writers who more closely resemble the cyberpunks in that regard (Tom Disch, Samuel Delaney, PKD spring to mind), they're folks who have more experience with street life -- a better vantage to human inertia in action. -- eric scoles ([email protected]) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
