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Snarkmarket (along with others) has been talking recently about the economic model implicit in the free release of New Liberal Arts and the deliberately limited revenue realized from its sale. As one of the authors of that book, I was conscious going into the project that I wouldn’t be paid for my contribution, no matter how successful or influential the book might become—and with the release of Chris Anderson’s book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” this seems like a good time to discuss working for free.

Virginia Postrel’s review of “Free” in the New York Times ends with the following paragraphs:

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Samuel Johnson said, and that attitude has had a good two-century run. But the Web is full of blockheads, whether they’re rate-busting amateurs or professionals trawling for speaking gigs. All this free stuff raises the real standard of living, by making it ever easier for people to find entertainment, information and communication that pleases them.

Business strategy, however, seeks not only to create but to capture value. Free is about a phenomenon in which almost all the new value goes to consumers, not producers. It is false to assume that no price means no value. But it is equally false to argue that value implies profitability.

This is true as far as it goes, but I think it’s more interesting as a starting point than an ending point. In particular, I feel like it misses the non-monetary value that work produces for those who do it.

Most of us, if we’re fortunate, derive some form of value from the work we do, above and beyond the pay we receive. We enjoy working, or we enjoy the status that results from doing a certain kind of work—being widely recognized as a scholarly authority or having our ideas praised by people we respect and admire. To the extent that this intrinsic value is higher than the monetary value we could receive for doing something else, we will happily work for less or work for free, because the non-economic rewards are so significant.

Now, in the previous economic paradigm, it was possible to do work that you would have done for less or for free and still be paid well for it, because it was too much trouble for your employers/clients to find someone who could do the work as well and for free. But the internet drastically reduces that barrier. Imagine trying to find people to write a computer operating system and all the associated applications without expecting payment before the internet—now look at Linux.

I wonder if we’re heading toward an economy where, to put it bluntly, people don’t get paid for doing fun things. If something is fun—for someone in the world who finds it fun enough to become good at it, and to do it without expecting pay—it will no longer pay.

In this world, people still work for money, maybe 20 hours a week, but they don’t really derive happiness from their jobs (if their job was something that people enjoyed doing, like playing in a symphony or writing poetry, it wouldn’t pay—someone would be doing it for free*). They spend the rest of their time doing things for free, things that produce tremendous creative value for themselves and for others, but form a gift economy outside the normal capitalist economy.

I think most creative, intellectual, and information-oriented pursuits would end up on the free side of that divide—which is not to devalue them at all. Rather, I think that clarity about the kinds of rewards you could expect from each activity could lessen a lot of the anxiety about “how will I make a living as a writer, journalist, playwright, composer?” Maybe you won’t—and that’s okay.

*When I say “free,” I don’t necessarily mean $0.00. You might still earn some token payments for your creative effort, but not enough to contribute in a meaningful way to your income—a few hundred dollars a year, perhaps.

There’s a great scene in Star Trek IV – yes, the one where the crew travels back in time to save whales – where Scotty, the engineer, tries to control a Macintosh by talking to it. When McCoy hands him the mouse, he speaks into it, in a sweetly coaxing voice: “Hello, computer!” When he’s told to use the keyboard (“How quaint!”), he irritably cracks his knuckles — and hunts-and-pecks at Warp 1 to pull up the specs for “transparent aluminum.”

As recently as 2000, it seemed inevitable that any minute now, we were going to be able to turn in our quaint keyboards and start controlling computers with our voice. Our computers were going to become just like our telephones, or even better, like our secretaries. But while voice and speech recognition and commands have gotten a lot better, generally the trend has been in the other direction – instead of talking to our computers, we’re typing on our phones.

(Which is arguably the hidden message of Scotty and the Mac – even somebody with the most powerful voice-controlled computer in the galaxy can touch-type like a champ. He probably only talks to the computer so his hands are free to text his friends while he’s engineering! “brb – needed on away team” — “anyone know how to recrystallize dilithium” — That’s why he’s so inventive! He’s crowdsourcing!)

The return to speech, in all of its immediacy, after centuries of the technological dominance of writing, seemed inevitable. The phonograph, film, radio, and television all seemed to point towards a future dominated by communications technology where writing and reading played an increasingly diminished role. I think the most important development, though, was probably the telephone. Ordinary speech, conversation, in real-time, where space itself appeared to vanish. It created a paradigm not just for media theorists and imaginative futurists but for ordinary people to imagine tomorrow.

This was Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” – a media and politics where the limitations of speech across place and time were virtually eliminated. Walter Ong called it “secondary orality” – we were seeing a return to a culture dominated by oral communication that wasn’t QUITE like the primary orality of nonliterate cultures – it was mediated by writing, by print, and by the technologies and media of the new orality themselves.

Towards the end of his life, in the mid-1990s, Ong gave an interview where he tried to explain how he thought his theory of secondary orality was being misapplied to electronic communications:

“When I first used the term ‘secondary orality,’ I was thinking of the kind of orality you get on radio and television, where oral performance produces effects somewhat like those of ‘primary orality,’ the orality using the unprocessed human voice, particularly in addressing groups, but where the creation of orality is of a new sort. Orality here is produced by technology. Radio and television are ‘secondary’ in the sense that they are technologically powered, demanding the use of writing and other technologies in designing and manufacturing the machines which reproduce voice. They are thus unlike primary orality, which uses no tools or technology at all. Radio and television provide technologized orality. This is what I originally referred to by the term ‘secondary orality.’

I have also heard the term ‘secondary orality’ lately applied by some to other sorts of electronic verbalization which are really not oral at all—to the Internet and similar computerized creations for text. There is a reason for this usage of the term. In nontechnologized oral interchange, as we have noted earlier, there is no perceptible interval between the utterance of the speaker and the hearer’s reception of what is uttered. Oral communication is all immediate, in the present. Writing, chirographic or typed, on the other hand, comes out of the past. Even if you write a memo to yourself, when you refer to it, it’s a memo which you wrote a few minutes ago, or maybe two weeks ago. But on a computer network, the recipient can receive what is communicated with no such interval. Although it is not exactly the same as oral communication, the network message from one person to another or others is very rapid and can in effect be in the present. Computerized communication can thus suggest the immediate experience of direct sound. I believe that is why computerized verbalization has been assimilated to secondary ‘orality,’ even when it comes not in oral-aural format but through the eye, and thus is not directly oral at all. Here textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange. To handle [page break] such technologizing of the textualized word, I have tried occasionally to introduce the term ‘secondary literacy.’ We are not considering here the production of sounded words on the computer, which of course are even more readily assimilated to ‘secondary orality’” (80-81).

This is where most of the futurists got it wrong – the impact of radio, television, and the telephone weren’t going to be solely or even primarily on more and more speech, but, for technical or cultural or who-knows-exactly-what reasons, on writing! We didn’t give up writing – we put it in our pockets, took it outside, blended it with sound, pictures, and video, and sent it over radio waves so we could “talk” to our friends in real-time. And we used those same radio waves to download books and newspapers and everything else to our screens so we would have something to talk about.

This is the thing about literacy today, that needs above all not to be misunderstood. Both the people who say that reading/writing have declined and that reading/writing are stronger than ever are right, and wrong. It’s not a return to the word, unchanged. It’s a literacy transformed by the existence of the electronic media that it initially has nothing in common with. It’s also transformed by all the textual forms – mail, the newspaper, the book, the bulletin board, etc. It’s not purely one thing or another.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Jacques Derrida quotes, from his essay “The Book to Come”:

What we are dealing with are never replacements that put an end to what they replace but rather, if I might use this word today, restructurations in which the oldest form survives, and even survives endlessly, coexisting with the new form and even coming to terms with the new economy — which is also a calculation in terms of the market as well as in terms of storage, capital, and reserves.

I doubt that “secondary literacy” will catch on, because it sounds like something that middle school English teachers do. But that’s too bad – because it’s actually a pretty good term to describe the world we live in.

Found this via Ezra Klein, whose admonishment to watch all the way to the end for the Pixar-worthy octopus feat is worth heeding:

One of my favorite “pop music meets pop culture” writers is Tom Ewing, who writes the “Poptimist” column for Pitchfork. Ewing’s posts have a way of generally filtering into the cultural conversation without him necessarily getting a lot of direct credit – for example, he beat Paul Constant to the punch back in May by writing an essay on Twitter in 140-character paragraphs.

Ewing’s newest column smartly juxtaposes the decline of the relevance of the Top 40 (particularly in the UK) with a certain strand of newspaper pessimism. I particularly like his definition of pop music as “a fragmented cross-section of popular culture squeezed into a tiny space, and the act of squeezing– when things were working– filled that space with energy and fizz.”

Well worth reading the whole thing – here’s a relevant sample:

Far more people worry about the decline of newspapers than the decline of the British pop charts, but their plight is comparable. Both packaged worlds of content into small things and let the different elements fight for attention. Both also enjoyed audiences who had to consume a whole to get at the parts they liked. Okay, a newspaper reader could skip over the sections they didn’t care about more easily than a radio listener could, but still a good headline might turn that half-second flicker of disinterest into attention. And in that half-second chance lived serendipity and argument.

For serendipity to happen you have to be able to give people what they don’t want– or don’t think they want– as well as what they do.

Maybe that’s a utopian conception of the newspaper as well as the Top 40 — but it seems like all we do is trade in utopian conceptions. Let’s kick this one around for a while.

This is the last day that Hilzoy will be blogging at Obsidian Wings and Washington Monthly. I don’t think everyone yet realizes what we as her readers are losing. As I wrote to Matt after we heard the news, “she wasn’t the most famous political blogger; she was just the best.”

A philosopher by training, she was compelled to blog in 2002 by what she saw as the craziness of the country then – not just the bad policies of the government, but brutal invective against anyone who doubted or wanted to debate them. Now, it’s calmer. As she wrote in her farewell post:

There are lots of people I disagree with, and lots of things I really care about, and even some people who seem to me to have misplaced their sanity, but the country as a whole does not seem to me to be crazy any more. Also, it has been nearly five years since I started. And so it seems to me that it’s time for me to turn back into a pumpkin and twelve white mice.

One of the things that’s sad for me, though, is that while Hilzoy was particularly fierce, patient, and logical in her approach to Big Issues In Politics, she was also attentive to things that typically draw much less attention. For example, her post on the unseriousness of Sarah Palin’s resignation pivots from smart but general things (government is serious business, a lame-duck governor can actually usually do more to affect policy than one who needs to secure re-election) to a very specific policy issue, with data to back it up:

As of 2007 (the most recent data I could find), Alaska was the fourth worst of 45 states reporting when it came to keeping kids from being abused in their foster homes — the homes they’re given to keep them safe from abuse and neglect. Alaska’s child protective services were the fifth worst in the nation at keeping kids from undergoing repeat abuse, the third worst in response time, and the sixth worst in terms of the time from an initial report of child abuse to receipt of services…

Foster care is one of those issues that liberals and conservatives ought to agree on. Kids are not responsible for being abused or neglected. They can’t just take care of themselves. And someone like Sarah Palin, who is forever talking about fighting for our children, might be expected to work at this. If she was looking for a way to spend her time other than taking junkets at taxpayer expense, it might have occurred to her to fix Alaska’s foster care system so that it really took care of Alaska’s kids.

If I had to put a label on Hilzoy’s best virtue as a blogger, it was this insistence on moral seriousness. Some of this was rooted in a basic respect for due diligence in policy decisions – see her blistering comments on the origins of the enhanced interrogation program. After all, she was a professional philosopher, who took reasoning and evidence seriously. One of my favorite posts of hers in this vein was her takedown of EO Wilson’s Atlantic Monthly article on biology and morality. She just knew her stuff cold.

But I think it was also rooted in her deep empathy for people who were abused, powerless, without recourse technical arguments as a means to solve their problems. She was also unafraid to interject her own experiences into the discussion. See her rebuttal to David Brooks’s complaint when a politician had grabbed his leg, which Brooks read as a signal that the code of dignity governing interactions had slipped away.

News flash: This has been happening to people forever, at least if you count women as people. Back when George Washington was writing out his “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation”, which Brooks cites as an example of the Dignity Code, Thomas Jefferson was hitting on Sally Hemings. A professor whose class I was enrolled in once grabbed my breasts at a party. Every woman I know has stories like this. Maybe being groped in a public setting is a novel experience for straight guys; not being a straight guy, I wouldn’t know. But if it is, that isn’t because no one ever groped anyone in a public setting before.

What can I say: nobody knows if hilzoy’s retirement will be like Jay-Z’s. I doubt it will be like Brett Favre’s, because she’s too deliberate to mess around with a decision like this. I do hope that we’ll be seeing her writing on politics and morality in some popular forum – because she is the real thing. And we need that.

After I followed Robin’s link to the photos of the Apollo 11 astronauts, I wondered, “why don’t we have ticker tape parades any more?” Of course, it’s because lower Manhattan isn’t swimming in ticker tape. We’ve got the words (a change in a stock price is still called an uptick or downtick) but the telegraph-and-paper-strip-printing machines are long gone.

On Metafilter, someone asked: “How long will it take to remove the word ‘videotape’ from the collective vocabulary?”

I caught myself yesterday asking somebody if his performance was videotaped. Of course, there is no tape involved in this process any more. Why was that the first phrase that sprang to mind even though “recorded” or “digitally recorded” are the technically accurate terms? How long does it take for language to catch up with technological obsolescence?

The short answer is that it doesn’t. Virtually nothing in language goes away, so long as it’s rooted sufficiently deep – it just restructures itself. Tape is a great example of this. The ticker tape era closed; the magnetic tape era opened. Tape itself went nowhere. Even the meaning of the noun – a thin, flat strip of material – didn’t change. The verb did; “tape” no longer meant “to shower with paper” – that would be “TP” – it means (or meant) to record or to stick. It doesn’t matter what the tape is made from, either. Tape used to just mean “ribbon,” especially a cloth ribbon used to tie clothing or parcels – but that sense is now mostly displaced by tape made of paper, cellophane, and metal.

The great thing about tape is that it shuns whatever qualifiers you want to put on it, and it’s still perfectly clear what it means. Tape is equally adhesive tape, audio tape, video tape, paper tape, surgical tape, the tape at the end of a race. And it always means both the physical strip of tape itself, its container, and its contents, as well as the act of putting the tape into use.

Are there other words that carry the same grammatical structures regardless of their contents? It’s almost like speakers intuitively assume, “well, if ‘tape’ is going to mean a ribbon AND to tie that ribbon, then it HAS to mean the sticky tape AND the act of sticking it, the magnetic tape AND the act of recording to it,” etc. We’re effortlessly swapping contexts all the time.

Claude L

Conceptual writer Kenny Goldsmith introduces a new issue of Poetry devoted to probably the most divisive no-va-nt-guar-d writing in generations:

Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end. And as different as they are, they have surprisingly come up with a set of similar solutions. Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.

Read more…

Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy goes there:

See, Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) is the closest thing to a hegemon which the rap world has known for a long time. He’s #1 on the Forbes list of the top earning rappers. He has an unimpeachable reputation, both artistic and commercial, and has produced some of the all-time best (and best-selling) hip hop albums including standouts Reasonable Doubt, The Blueprint and the Black Album. He spent several successful years as the CEO of Def Jam Records before buying out his contract a few months ago to release his new album on his own label. And he’s got Beyoncé. Nobody, but nobody, in the hip hop world has his combination of hard power and soft power. If there be hegemony, then this is it. Heck, when he tried to retire after the Black Album, he found himself dragged back into the game (shades of America’s inward turn during the Clinton years?).

But the limits on his ability to use this power recalls the debates about U.S. primacy. Should he use this power to its fullest extent, as neo-conservatives would advise, imposing his will to reshape the world, forcing others to adapt to his values and leadership? Or should he fear a backlash against the unilateral use of power, as realists such as my colleague Steve Walt or liberals such as John Ikenberry would warn, and instead exercise self-restraint?

But here’s the other question: are Jay-Z and Beyoncé really in the same game? What about The Shins? In other words, maybe one set of actors are in the sphere of realist power politics, and another set are acting under a completely different set of assumptions – maybe idealist, maybe postmodern, maybe not based on the nation-state/single artist framework at all.

This was always my issue whenever we examined competing explanatory frameworks in political science: the assumption that whatever assumptions you made, they had to apply to all actors equally and individual actors consistently.

To me, it seemed (and seems) perfectly consistent to suppose that rational actors could be operating under different frameworks of rationality at different times, or even in some instances scuttling rationality altogether due to misinformation, contradictory internal forces, or misguided teleologies. “You can’t build models that way,” my freshman poli sci teacher said, half-joking but half-serious. No, I guess you can’t.

Ezra Klein writes that “I imagine that when Sonia Sotomayor is putting together her scrapbook of memories from the time she was nominated for the United States Supreme Court, this will be a page she’ll particularly treasure”:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), seeking to discredit Judge Sonia Sotomayor

The title is half a joke, but half true. Part of navigating the logic, grammar, and rhetoric of this century of scarcity and abundance is going to involve not just working and understanding flows of goods and money, growing and eating things, understanding marketing or images, or managing your attention and identity (or identities), but also trying to figure out what you give away and what you charge for, what you take and what you pay for, and why and how you do all of these things.

Many, many people have been at least as interested in how and why we printed only 200 copies of New Liberal Arts and then gave digital copies away as they’ve been interested in any or all of the entries. And you know what? I’m kind of more interested in that too — at least for the past thirty minutes or so.

Kevin Kelly’s formulation of what we did is worth repeating: “The scarce limited edition of the physical subsidizes the distribution of the unlimited free intangible.” We knew that we wanted to make an honest-to-goodness well-made book*, AND that we wanted everything to be freely available on the web. I don’t think there was ever a conversation about doing it any other way.

But I think there’s a difference between just selling a physical thing and giving it away for free. One of the things that I think was clever was the “ransom” model that Robin came up with, whereby the free copies were only released after the print run was sold. I think it was the motive of patronage, the aligning of the interests of the purchasers with the freeriders, that made it work.

(Aside: When I was a kid, I remember how the Detroit Lions’ football games on TV used to be blacked-out in Detroit whenever the Silverdome didn’t sell out. Since the Lions stunk, this happened a lot, and CBS wouldn’t even show you another football game, you’d just be stuck watching reruns or infomercials instead of football, which made you hate the Lions even more.)

Janneke Adema keys in on this:

Actually this is just a variant of the delayed Open Access model, in which after a certain embargo time the books or journals are made Open Access. What I like however about the example Kelly mentions of the New Liberal Arts book, a Snarkmarket/Revelator Press collaboration, is how they combine this delayed Open Access model with a community support or maecenas model.

In another, earlier entry, she elaborates:

It looks like we might be slowly returning to the old Maecenas system, or Maecenate, when it comes to culture, flourishing as it did in the old Rome of Virgil and Horace, and still visible today in many a country’s subsidy system, stimulating (historically) mostly the so called “high arts” which in some cases and some countries have known some kind of patronage or state subsidy for ages (the Dutch system is a good example in this respect).

What seems clear however is that this new digital Maecenic culture will be quite different in many respects from so called subsidy systems. It will be way more “democratic” for one, no longer favoring art picked out by committees of wise experts but directly benefiting those chosen by the public to merit their money. It will also not be a “traditional” Maecenic culture in which a few rich people out of philanthropy and the goodness of their hearth give their money to the arts or the projects they endorse. This new Maecenic culture will probably be upheld by large communities of people of all income classes, all offering a little money to support their favorite band, artist or cultural entrepreneur (think of those small labels again).

The new digital Maecenate! Just typing it gives me shivers of delight.

Until I read Adema’s post, though, the way I’d been thinking about it was less classical, and maybe less flattering. I was thinking about Polish farmers in Prussia.

Okay, I’ll explain. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism begins with a weird and probably a little racist anecdote about Catholic farmers in the Eastern province of Germany. The farmers, and young people from the farms who’d emigrated to the cities, didn’t seem to respond to economic incentives. They were traditionalists: if you showed them a new way to farm that yielded more crops, unless the difference was overwhelming, they didn’t care; they’d just do it the way they always did it. If you paid them more for their crops to try to get them to produce more, they’d work less, because they could live off of the same amount of money they’d always had.

Actually Weber very smartly avoided the racist conclusion – that the Polish farmers were congenitally lazy — that most of the Prussian farmowners who employed these Polish workers had made. Instead, he concluded that to work your butt off to make more money than you could most likely spend was actually a very strange way to live – that it wasn’t, as some of the early economists and social engineers thought, a natural and universal response to maximize utility, but a historically contingent phenomenon.

He spends the rest of his startlingly brilliant book trying to trace the conditions under which that phenomenon could have emerged based on the startling economic success made by Protestant sects in Western Europe and the United States, all of which hinged on new notions of work and personal austerity that turned out to be, quite accidentally, a primary engine in the development of modern capitalism as it emerged in the West.

So, where am I going with this?

Well, the NLA model is like a color negative of the noncapitalist peasant. I say a color negative because the economic conditions have actually reversed. The peasant could earn more, but he didn’t really have any place to put it. Once his physical needs were met, he had no reason to keep working. He would curtail the potential abundance of nature when the scarce physical resources were purchased.

What can do is the opposite – to unlock the potential abundance of the artificial once the scarce physical resources have been paid for. Instead of stopping work – stopping the flow of goods and closing the circuit of circulation – this opens it up. This is only natural.

*My calfskin-and-vellum copy is particularly nice.