Out of Egypt:

the "gray goo" problem of new media

Filesharing havens like the Pirate Bay are unleashing round after round of "creative destruction" on intellectual property rights as we know them. And it's not easy to feel sympathetic for the MPAA, especially when you read about how they opposed the Betamax in its day.

However, I somehow doubt that the future of rock is an Outback Steakhouse commercial. We may be living in "Remix Culture", but when everyone's busy making YTMNDs and mashups, who's going to make the originals?

As a creative person, I know that there some things I won't do for free. Blog, yes; do investigative journalism, no. Blogging hotspots like Gawker.com are parasitic on the old media which they hold in such contempt. It's easier to be a blogger than to run a newspaper, but easier still to comment on someone else's blog. What happens when the disintermediators get disintermediated?

Since the birth of mass media, media creation has been a function of the market rather than of an intellectual elite. This has served us well in many respects, but not so well in others. The market cares about "content", not about culture. And content is a commodity which, like all commodities, is sought at the lowest price possible.

New media are beneficial insofar as they lower the barrier of entry for potential content creators. However, in doing this, they also have the potential to displace older media, just as television displaced radio dramas or film displaced vaudeville. Since hypertext is what I call a "master medium" - capable of conveying the content of all other media - it has the potential to displace all of them.

There would be nothing wrong with this except that hypertext as we know it is transmitted on the Web, and there is no generally accepted way of directly compensating content creators for Web content. Advertising is only a stopgap solution, and is especially dubious as long as Google has such market dominance.

Nearly everything that people create today is either directly offered for free online, or is available for free through illegal online services. This is destroying the incentive for many forms of content to be produced. Of course, new forms are taking their place, but these favor the lowest common denominator, rather than distinctive insights or creative genius. The two characteristic literary styles of "Web 2.0" are Wikipedia's denatured "NPOV" and the blogosphere's frenetic flamewars.

Jaron Lanier calls this "digital Maoism", but it's really just consistent capitalism. What is Digg if not a Wal-Mart of the postmodern mind, catering to all our cultural needs at the lowest prices?

Of course, "free culture" critics are free to create something better. But if they can't earn a living doing so, then they'll have to either: a) get a "real" job (doing IT or working at Starbucks - the two viable careers of a post-industrial age?) and "do culture" as a hobby, b) be subsidized by the state, or c) work for a nonprofit or academic institution (and depend on the kindness of strangers to keep their endeavor afloat). Compared to the position of the author, etc. in the pre-digital era, this seems like a step down.

Unless we can find a way to compensate creative people fairly for their work in the digital age, the "grey goo" of lowest-common-denominator "user contributed content" may supplant much of the culture we once had.

Here's something somewhat related.

Posted by: funke at June 23, 2008 6:31 PM

PS Even in a pre-digital age, the artist who profited by his work was often the anomaly, until the print era...just look at Mozart. Buried in a pauper's grave. Haydn living at the whim and mercy of his patron. Bach spending his life working as the church organist (not a very lucrative career but enough to support his 11 some odd children).

When concrete objects could be sold (i.e. a book, a cd) then artists had at last a reproduceable product. But apparently that brief era is over already.

Posted by: funke at June 23, 2008 6:49 PM

In re: your PS - I'm lamenting the end of the copyright era. I know it wasn't always thus. The place of the artist was very different under the patronage system.

Still, I believe that it would be possible to protect the rights of the creator in the digital age. It's just not a problem that we've figured out yet.

Posted by: Evan Donovan at June 23, 2008 9:03 PM