Chris Anderson Is Worse Than Wal-Mart
Wired editor Chris Anderson raised issue with and made some explanations regarding yesterday's Malcolm Gladwell review of his book, Free, which has chunks of other people's work in it. Unfortunately, he ends his concluding paragraph with a question. To which he hedges the answer. And then he ends in disaster—proposing a system of labor divorced almost entirely from profit, a bizarre model so hyper-capitalist that it resembles nothing so much as a digital-age medieval society. He would even create a new class of corporate vassalage! Is this what he possibly really thinks? He says yes!
Anderson provides an example regarding something that Gladwell found confusing—of what Anderson means by the future of professional writing being organized as "paying people to get other people to write," instead of institutions paying people directly to write.
* Wired.com makes good money selling ads on GeekDad (it's very popular with advertisers)
* Ken [that site's "community manager"] gets a nominal retainer, but has also managed to parlay GeekDad into a book deal and a lifelong dream of being a writer
* The other contributors largely write for free, although if one of their posts becomes insanely popular they'll get a few bucks. None of them are doing it for the money, but instead for the fun, audience and satisfaction of writing about something they love and getting read by a lot of people.So that's the difference between "paying people to write" and "paying people to get other people to write". Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc).
It works great for all involved. Is it the model for the newspaper industry? Maybe not all of it, but it is the only way I can think of to scale the economics of media down to the hyperlocal level.
(Emphases mine.) Wow. Okay!
What's now totally unclear is how that is actually anything resembling a working model for the newspaper industry. Or any industry, really! Including a blog about geeky dads, even. Also how someone who is being paid to think for a living could suggest any of that with a straight face.
What he is actually proposing is the complete divorce of capital and earnings from those who make the product that is being sold. The only thing that is "Free" in this instance is the labor of the people who earn Chris Anderson money.
What he is literally saying is that the business side of an editorial operation—which is, in this case, the owners, not merely the part of the organization that handles the business of the site—is the complete authority of the editorial operation. That they retain all of the value, and that they have no obligation to share any of that income with any other part of the business. (In his description, this website in question "makes good money," which then pays the people who make the website something "nominal; a few bucks," or nothing at all.)
All of which is to say that the owners provide none of the product which is actually being sold and retain nearly all of the profit of that labor.
What he is proposing is down somewhere, on the scale of ethics, well beneath Wal-Mart's policies of no longer hiring any full-time workers so as to avoid health and unemployment insurance. It is in fact some weird sort of neo-feudal, post-contract-worker society, in which he will create a dystopian and eager volunteer-slave system of "attention-paid" enthusiasts (which is to say, people with no other options, and no capital of their own) to create products from which rich people can get richer.
For just one quibble in the actual model: Say this model is exported to newspapers. What exactly happens when news breaks during business hours, as the volunteer, "attention-paid" "content creation" force is at their day jobs, where they do get paid? (Jobs which are located, um, in what industry? Do these night-time journalists make… cars? Oh wait, no one does now!)
This would all be really funny if Chris Anderson weren't actually a well-off man, who has already put this system into practice, who employs actual people, and who is now out evangelizing, for pay, for this actual paradigm shift in the actual workforce of real people. (Also, he is not the only one—these ideas of his are being put into place at several editorial operations because everyone has run out of ideas.)
What's worse, maybe even, is that Anderson has treated the Gladwell review as a funny "dispute", because, he says, Gladwell feels "threatened." Is that one or two logical fallacies, treating any argument about his ideas as something other than substantive, as motivated by something other than actual disagreement (or disgust)?
Similarly, though he said he felt "sick" or some such about the plagiarism in his book, he has brushed off the matter entirely—and it seems to be no matter that, at the company where he has his own day job, the sort of day job where the company has regularly co-signed mortgages for its top-level employees, such as Anderson—that sort of plagiarism is certainly a firing offense.
Looking on the brighter side of all this? Well, it's nice to be reminded once again that ideas—and the people who put them forward—can actually be dangerous and harmful! I guess.
N.B. Disclosure: this website we have here is so far profitless (changing quite soon, knock on wood!) and is planning to pay writers—and its staff!—when it has income. Because that is the right thing to do, paying people for their labor.
Digital sharecropping (coined by Seth Finkelstein, I think). 'The Long Tail' posited much the same arrangement: the 'head' extracting most of the value; 20% getting 80%; all very long-boom.
. . .a bizarre model so hyper-capitalist that it resembles nothing so much as a digital-age medieval society. He would even create a new class of corporate vassalage!
Well, I was feeling pretty lousy about my colonial-era student loan induced indentured servitude. Until I read this. I am slightly better off than a serf – relief!
"If you really loved me, you'd give it away."
Take note Google, all those employees could be yours for the cafeteria expenses alone. Build a few dorms and pack them into bunk beds like a Chinese manufacturing facility.
Do commenters get some of this massive Nissan Cube money????
Where's your enthusiasm?
I just want the attention
I curbed it.
They do already. Per comment.
The rate is something like 10-1000 of a penny per.*
To realize even a penny, you would have to post at an incredible rate.
*The rate is 1.5x for starred commenters.
It didn't like my superscript tag! Should be ten raised to the minus one-thousand. A small number.
A quick word on the compensation model at the Awl, which has been used as a brick to be thrown at others in disputes elsewhere:
Every startup has a grace period where heavy reliance on interns, equity labor, free beer labor, etc. is not shameful, even if it's not ideal. The rules are, you only have a year's period to do that at max, you must start paying everyone (even in minuscule amounts) the second you start showing profits, and YOU MUST NEVER EVER BRAG TO THE MEDIA ABOUT HOW YOU'VE FOUND A GREAT BUSINESS MODEL THAT DOES NOT FEED OR SHELTER YOUR WORKERS. Any attempt to breach those rules should be met with derision in the business community.
Beyond that, I think people know that the volunteer opportunities at good startups are often quite rewarding, more so than taking a poorly-paid internship at some Conde rag where they'll have you sit in a closet and do something awfully clerical the entire time.
Anderson is just trying to sell books. No one could be that fucking stupid, right?
I won't buy it. It costs too much.
The laity is a conspiracy against the profession.
One of the interesting concepts nobody brings up is that, inevitably, your most verbose and productive commenters get pissed off or disillusioned by one thing or another – hostile community members, a disagreement with management, having said everything there is to be said about the community's topic – and leave.
I've observed this in every single online community, without exception. Paying those who provide the best content would provide incentive for them to stay and continue adding to the community. As it is, there is no counterpoint to "reaperx1983 just dissed me", "why did you delete my post, admin?" or "we've already posted about this a thousand times, lrn2search".
Historically, money provides that counterpoint.
But what do I know, I'm not CHRIS FUCKING ANDERSON, but my baldness is hotter, and I would like to own slaves, too.
I don't know if it's a working model, but it's not remotely new.
also, can we just about whether the typically outstandng editors at the New Yorker are even allowed to touch Gladwell's writing anymore?
Joshc is right, this model is not remotely new. I read an article in the Believer at least 5 years ago about the "Chicken Soup For The Soul" books in which it explained that the "authors" of those books (who were making millions off them, at least at the time) were the only ones getting paid, but that they weren't writing any of the content in the books, functioning more as editors. The people who contributed their essays contributed those essays for free.
The original blogger book deal.
just like Postcards From Yo Momma? Or, to pick an insanely profitable example, Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation??
I'd like to see Anderson, or better yet that sociopath Timothy Ferris, write a book distilling the process of ferreting out old, semi-utopian ideas which are impletmented successfully by very few people at best and then marketing these ideas as if they are/will be universally applicable truths.
I have a dirty secret. I have done my share of free art and design work over the years. I have also at times sold and licensed my artwork for a pittance. Why? Lots of reasons. Maybe it's just cynical middle age creeping up on me, but the more I do this, the less I like it. Maybe I have finally decided that my work, my training, my talent and my time have value and should be treated accordingly
http://www.visualartcopyright.com/articles/free.html
My favorite part of this is that to illustrate his post touting the virtues of Free, Chris Anderson steals an illustration (that the New Yorker paid for) from Gladwell's review…
This is a test: Link here