“If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and content-less. The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”
- From The Serfdom of Crowds by Jaron Lanier. Published in Harper’s magazine, February 2010.
I have yet to see a successful model for monetizing content online, but I also have yet to see any content producer successfully ignore the internet. Monetizing content requires you to define its worth, and while traditionally something is worth what people will pay for it, by now it is clear that doesn’t apply to the hive. How to define the worth of content online is one of the biggest unanswered questions remaining for authors, journalists, musicians, and artists as we are swept without consent into the superhuman hive mind. That question is made even more difficult by the fact that it is impossible to ignore what it contributes to us without commanding anything in return.
And here I stand, swamped.
March 3, 2010 at 8:11 am |
I NEED a copy of that photo dude. please email me one high rez?? plweeeeze?!
March 3, 2010 at 8:11 am |
btw:you and I need to talk. I can show you many successful models.
March 3, 2010 at 8:38 pm |
The photo isn’t mine, but I would have credited if I knew who shot it. All posts containing my photos are categorized under ‘See.’
March 9, 2010 at 12:32 pm |
I was down with this until:
“The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”
Actually, this is historically incorrect. It does not follow that advertising led to the crafts and arts (visual, words or otherwise) being asked to give up their work for free. On the contrary, advertising (as well as money) has led to the strictures of enclosure, copyright and intellectual copyright.
A more accurate statement would read something like: “The basic idea of this new unsocial contract is that those who create are encouraged to sell their work to corporate monopolies which then pay a pittance for content which will be copyrighted beyond their death and held in perpetuity by a ‘person’ under the law that cannot die, thus depriving the world of the wealth of the work.”
All content creators know that their work is never original, nor singular; it arrives, though always as an event, through the collaborative inheritance of the many, and anyone who makes something great knows that they owe a great debt to all who came before and contributed the small stones that made up this new, great cathedral.
Point being, art is always made in a circulation of a gift economy. It is corporate capital that imposes the ideological framework to be found in the above quote, which is completely ass-backwards.
It is not art that needs to be charged for. It is the system that refuses to share pay equality, no matter what the job, that needs to be undone, the system that holds captive the creative hopes of humanity.
March 12, 2010 at 2:44 am |
Let me get back to you on this. You illustrate the bigger picture with skill, but I need to think on what you wrote. I feel there is a gap somewhere.