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.
—Choire