Thanks, Eric -- your reflections are always worth a lot to me. After I read them, I realized that we're overlapping our ranges of discussion, but they don't completely match up. I think I was being too indistinct about the points I was making. I regret doing that -- too hasty, I guess.
I'll try to give these points a little better focus in comments below. Dana Eric Scoles wrote: > > > On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Dana Paxson <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > Everyone loses except the DRM owner, who is usually the outfit > with the most money. Not the creator of value, and not its consumer. > > We've already built a two-tier system that gets around this, but > at the cost of losing leverage and wealth for value creators. The > upper tier plays the DRM game, with the big firms. The lower tier > works a paying job to finance the creation of value, and uses the > gain to produce art. The art then sells in a set of markets > restricted by lack of the big marketing money that grants wider > visibility. > > > > I'm not sure this is an accurate characterisation. I have a few issues > with it. > > First, you focus on 'working a paying job to finance creation of > value.' That's an interesting statement right there, on both ends, and > I'm not sure where to start so I'll start with 'creation of value.' > What does that mean? In capitalist terms, there's no value if someone > doesn't *deem* value; a free-market response to that idea would be, if > no one's paying, there's no value created. That sounds harsh and I > don't mean it as a -- er -- value judgement. What I mean to point out > is that *value is subjective*. Unless you can sell the work or in some > other way profit from it, you're creating value primarily *to you*. > That other people benefit from it is irrelevant to the value equation, > *except as it relates to the value you perceive in that*. Well... value today is not value tomorrow. Ask the family of any dead artist. The artist makes little money, or worse, none at all if it's for hire; the owners then bid it up after the artist's death into fortunes. Nothing wrong with bidding up the value -- but let's not deceive ourselves about the way the game is played. Artists who figure out the game and take the time and energy to play it do a hell of a lot better than those who don't. Those who don't, well, just make art. Want a good price? Just wait. If no one bids it up, you'll get it cheap. Sound familiar? (BTW, I just read Craig's comment on the 'working a paying job' -- that puts the matter clearly. Correlations between money and value are for the most part illusory. Great story in that respect: Michael Gruber's "The Forgery of Venus".) As you see, these remarks are about all kinds of art, not just fiction in prose. > > On the other end, you're 'working at a paying job.' That's in fact > what the vast, vast majority of writers do, and in fact it's what the > vast, vast majority of all artists have always done throughout > history. Aside from work-for-hire writers (who obviously do make a > living writing), fictionists and writers of books hardly ever really > make a living off their books or fictions. They may make a big chunk > of it that way, but they'll have to go out and supplement it by > teaching, giving talks, consulting, writing articles, and so on. More > often than not, writers who build a living that way will be able to do > it /because of /their publications. Yes. Do we think that's a good thing? I know I accept it as fact. I'm not so sure I like it, especially when I have to keep choosing, agonizingly, between precious hours spent publishing one kind of thing while hearing the passionate, beautiful voices of other utterances in me. And I sometimes long to receive more from an artist so bound up with the ills of earning a living that he or she has no resources left with which to produce the art. > > Now, that might not be what you're talking about. You may be talking > about a lower tier who never actually gets published, or who obtains > little to no income from their publication. Of course that's a big > chunk, too, but such has always been the case. In fact, we've been > blessed with such leisure and disposable income that such a class is > now, in these past two or three hundred years, really possible for the > first time. Both tiers are the subject. Human artistic expression in any form flows from all of us in one way or another, at one level or another. I'm not so sure about leisure being there. But DRM simply obstructs the whole process, and benefits only the DRM owner, dribbling out a carefully-calibrated sum to the originator if anything gets dribbled out at all. It's funny how some mega-popular rock bands took the tunes of the old bluesmen and turned millions, if not billions, in profit on them, and the originators got zot. Such things -- and this is far from the only example, as Disney's trips to Congress to get extensions on copyright will attest as well -- do not inspire respect for DRM, or indeed for copyright in general as it is treated today. > > I actually think that most "value harvesting" is going to be happening > in the upper-reaches of the middle tier -- the space occupied by in SF > by the Charlie Strosses and Cory Doctorows, and in music by people > like Neko Case or Ani diFranco. I like seeing these developments. > I'd bet you none of these people are making big bucks, but I'll also > bet you that they're quite comfortable for the moment, and the reason, > as another exemplar, Steve Earle, likes to explain, is because they > work hard at it -- and, well, because enough people think they're > really good at it. "Really good" is the whole thing, isn't it? Further on in this thread, we get to the mediator problem, and when we can FIND the "really good" thanks to the mediators (and I wouldn't mind paying something to see their evaluations), a new model might just emerge. > > In writing, right now and for the forseeable future, there's not a > means to make a "decent middle class living" (Steve Earle again) as > the writing equivalent of an indie musician, where if you commit to > playing a certain number of gigs in a year's time you can keep afloat > playing music. That's not a fault of any system or conspiracy as much > as it is of the nature of the medium: People don't pay $10/head plus > drinks to read from a book for a couple of hours. That's not going to > change. BB King has his own night club and a nice nest egg, but if he > were a writer doing 300 readings a year, instead of a guitar player > doing 300 gigs a year -- well, I don't think he'd have a nightclub and > a nest egg. Good point -- writing is not playing music. But as long as we keep DRM in the picture, we keep the focus on the money, and that's a curse we bring on ourselves. Money has its place, but so does art. Artists do their art, and if they don't give a rat's ass about the money, they will be poor! As artists, the choice is always ours. We keep looking for advocates for new ways of getting innovators, including artists, compensated for the wonders they produce. I like Lawrence Lessig's attempts to address these things, even if I think he's a bit hard to read. His "Free Culture" and "The Future of Ideas" set the tone, and I still have to dig deeper in them. > > > The Web is changing that a little. Artists who would never have > been seen except in a club or a meeting now gain attention > globally, but the process is haphazard and payment is chancy at > best. As many have found, it's hard to give fine art away -- > somehow big price tags seem to convey an idea of value, which is > about as misleading as things get. > > > > Yep, that's a problem. But I'm uncomfortable with the idea of someone > I respect playing that game, instead of subverting it. So I tend not > to have a lot of respect for fine artists who get fat paychecks for > single works, and I try to make no judgement about quality in relation > to how big someone's advance was. That can be hard to do, sometimes. > > IOW, I think the more useful thing to society as a whole is for us to > not buy into the "fine art deserves a big paycheck" mentality. > > In fact, I tend to believe that the value of art may well end up > *looking like* it's in inverse proportion to the artist's average > payment for said art. At least in most cases. Sadly, I agree. > > I recently heard Andrei Codrescu point out that art does really well > in two kinds of times: Prosperous times, and desperate ones. It > doesn't do so well when things are chugging comfortably along as > normal. He argued that in the prosperous times, there was lots of > largesse and people with money wanted to be seen supporting art, > because it made them feel as though they were important. In desperate > times, artists had no money but did art anyway, and people were > hungrier for it because, well, things were bleak. > > Where he didn't go -- he gets what, 60 seconds? so I suppose I > shouldn't fault him -- is what the qualities of the art were in each > of those times. I think he doesn't like to go there, but I would > conjecture that the art of a comfortable time is probably > qualitatively different from the art of a despreate time. And my > expectation (which I'd be happy to test if I had more time to think > about it) would be that the art of desperate times is more disruptive, > and hence has more mutational value, if you will. > > I think that would be true also of the lowest tier of art production. > That's where I'd look for the really challenging and interesting > stuff: Where it's coming out from need to produce it, not need to get > paid for it. There we have it. This brushes lightly against Thomas Kuhn, who could have written a companion to his famed book, but styled "The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions". Artists will issue art regardless of money. As a parallel, read Lee Smolin's "The Trouble With Physics", which says in effect that superstring theory gets all the glamor because it gets all the money, not necessarily because it's better theory. > > BTW, I'm not trying to denigrate your desire to be compensated for > your art, Dana, and I'm not trying to preach to you. I'm thinking > through this stuff in the way that makes sense to me. And I hope > you'll note that I'm well aware you don't get paid much if anything > for your art, and where that puts you in my conjectures ;-). I'm pleased. If I had done what others wanted me to do, this patent on digital watermarking would not be sitting on my desk right now, with others on the way. And I would not be nearly as happy as I feel right now, either. The idea of patenting a form of protection of one's literary work must seem counter in some ways to all I've said, but I do these things to prevent the DRM people from grabbing what I've done and using it against me. Besides, it's damn fun to build these things, at least for me. That's a part of my art. I want artists to get their share, whatever that is. I've seen far too much pain in the eyes of far too many friends. They deserve better -- writers, musicians, painters, graphic designers, software programmers, inventors, you name it. DRM is not their friend. > > > > But if we find ways to get from creator directly to consumer, > without the global slushpile getting in the way, DRM will die. It > may never happen, but one can hope... > > > > This is the mediator problem, and it's a biggie. Massive > disintermediation was the siren-song of the original dotcom boom, and > it's still echoing in the halls of web 2.0 startups and VCs. But now > people are trying to build non-mediator mediators: Whether it's "smart > mobs" or statistical aggregations of preference or netowrks of trust, > they're trying to replace mavens with technology. It's really just > replacing one mediator with another; there always has to be a > mediator, whether it's Ahmet Ertegun or the iTunes recommendation system. True. But why couldn't today's magazines become tomorrow's redirectors? Turn the editors loose on the global slushpile (oh, that's frightening, isn't it?) and let all the artists put a micropayment in the bin. Same small payment for everyone who pays. Then anyone can get listed, even if they're number two billion in the list, or not even visible at all. "Tough on ya, Jake, the story didn't make the cut." Let the editors sort out who does what and with what. We do this stuff now, don't we, in other areas? Couldn't F&SF become a table of contents, free to readers but underwritten by the world of its submitting authors? > > I don't have faith that any system will very long be driven by real > public input. First, that's too chancy -- people aren't going to want > to stake their fortunes on that. Second, I doubt public input is going > to end up being worth what Malcolm Gladwell thinks it is. But I've > already said more than I should have this evening, when I should be > writing something more artistic and less intellectual-ish. I'm grateful for your reflections, Eric. Thanks. And some day, at an undisclosed future point, I'll have more to say about Kindle... (;-) Best, Dana > > > > > Dana > > > > Eric Scoles wrote: >> >> >> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 1:30 PM, cd <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> >> >> DRM will completely rule the day, I believe. And here's why: >> DRM >> will be like your stock proxy statement: it need only be so >> confusing >> that you relent, and give up on asserting your rights. >> >> >> >> I mostly agree, with qualifications: >> >> * In the "Developed" ("First"?) world; >> * For the medium term. >> >> >> Beyond the medium term I really don't believe we can say. DRM >> will be an economic drain on first world economies; it's a layer >> of infrastructure and process that people won't have to put up >> with in developing nations. First-worlders can try to bar entry >> by developing nations, and that might work. >> >> A really effective DRM scheme would require top-down control (or >> at least visibility) of just about every activity we can engage >> in that can have economic consequences. Basically a capitalist >> version of Big Brother. >> >> Your scenario is maybe a little less than fully effective: Good >> enough to confuse us. You may be right. I sort of hope not, >> because the more extreme vision is easier to get people riled up >> about. >> >> OTOH, that "good enough to confuse us" scenario is also good >> enough for totalitarian control. >> >> >> >> >> >> >> My wife just switched her iPod from PC to Mac. She lost half her >> purchased content. Now, you can spend hours and hours, >> tracking down >> for each purchased recording who controls the DRM, and figure >> out if >> they have records that you bought it, and then see if they'll >> let you >> transfer. Or you can relent because you have a life, and >> take another >> step towards pay-per-use. >> >> >> >> This is what I meant when I was saying that transferring DRM >> media fundamentally requires an infrastructure. You either have >> an infrastructure, or you have totally free media. I can see your >> argument about this being steps on a path toward pay-per-use; I >> actually think the revenue might be greater for pay-to-replace, >> if the DRM environment stays confusing to the point of >> user-hostility. >> >> But you're right, a pay-per-use model of some kind is likely. I >> reckon the more likely form it will take initially is as service >> fees. No smart seller is going to want to have a blatant >> pay-per-use system out there, especially not for leisure items >> like music or books, because it will inhibit consumption and >> breed ill-will. So they'll disguise it. >> >> Kindle can be our guide here: Everything you get on your Kindle >> is tethered to Amazon. The device has a fair amount of capacity, >> but you can easily imagine people outstripping that. In such a >> case, Amazon just stores the stuff for you (or so I understand). >> By virtue of that, or of the fact that they have total access to >> your Kindle at any time, they have total control over your >> library -- and they can charge you for access to it. They'll >> frame it as "defraying cost" to start with, and I doubt they'll >> shut off your ability to get to the content on "your" Kindle >> [curious: do people actually "own" their Kindles?], but I'm >> betting they will in some sense start to charge for the storage, >> and sooner rather than later. Probably within the next two years. >> >> >> >> >> >> We're moving inexorably towards a model in which the >> corporations that >> distribute culture will demand from us pay-per-use and >> pay-per-media >> (e.g., that new right they invented in which they get to >> control not >> only the content but how you utilize it -- so you can't let an >> algorithm read it). >> >> >> >> This is really thought-control, in a sense. It's a more subtle >> manifestation of the same ideas that underpin NewSpeak: >> Controlling the distribution and redistribution of creative >> product constrains the mutational functions of art. If you >> control how content can be passed around, you can have really >> unprecedented levels of control over the ways that people >> /think/. (Think: "The Girl Who Was Plugged In." Tiptree was both >> a psychologist and a former Spook, after all.) >> >> It's obvious that entrenched interests would want to control the >> flow and direction of art; in doing so, they could end up with >> the societal equivalent of an AKC-certified purebred, good for >> show or narrowly-constrained tasks, and not much of anything else. >> >> Societies that didn't have that kind of constraint would still be >> free to adapt in ways that ours wouldn't. So that's why part of >> me keeps saying (contra so many SFian authorial voices) that >> there's hope for the future in places like Africa, where there's >> less technological infrastructure for control. >> >> (Of course, since they'll be going with newer technology right >> out of the gate, that window might now last long...) >> >> >> >> >> >> I'm disgusted that many of the writer organizations are on >> the wrong >> side of this battle. We're as bad as Disney, making use of our >> history and then not only demanding no one make use of us, but >> supporting the choking of the channels as a result. We >> complain about >> the publishing business and then our organizations line up >> behind the >> very interests that destroy it. >> >> >> A lot of it seems to me to be driven by no one wanting to give up >> the idea that they may one day be best-sellers with million-$$ >> contracts. As Tom Tomorrow likes to put it: "I am opposed to >> taxing the wealthy because I believe that I may someday become >> wealthy." >> >> >> >> -- >> eric scoles ([email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>) >> >> > > > > > > -- > eric scoles ([email protected] <mailto:[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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
