the onda

VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has a fascinating and incredibly well-written editorial in the WSJ today called "World Wide Mush" where he looks at the dark side of what he calls "digital collectivism," or the ethos behind the platforms and projects that have most benefited from user contributions.

As a huge fan of open source over proprietary software, and insightful bloggers over established journalists, I was particularly taken by his claim that the era of digital collectivism is destroying the ability for the folks engaged in intellectual work to make a decent living. As he writes:

We're well over a decade into this utopia of demonetized sharing and almost everyone who does the kind of work that has been collectivized online is getting poorer. There are only a tiny handful of writers or musicians who actually make a living in the new utopia, for instance. Almost everyone else is becoming more like a peasant every day.

This is a bold claim— however it is one which he supports with a number of interesting arguments that make the piece a gem. Curious as to whether I could do some of my own quick research on the peasantization of the folks at the frontier of digital culture, I turned to Indeed's fantastic salary comparison search engine to try to tease out the differences in jobs available to folks playing in similar but distinct positions.

I started with my favorite: bloggers versus traditional journalists: according to Indeed, the average salaries for jobs listing "blogger," "reporter," and "journalist" in their title or descriptions are $34K, $44K, and $52K respectively. Ouch!

Turning then to software, where there is little doubt of the leverage and impact of open source, I was similarly surprised. I wanted to look at web developers according to technology of choice so I picked "PHP" (the most prevalent and totally open source), "Struts" (a Java-based middle ground between both worlds), and "ASP.NET" (Microsoft's completely proprietary stack) and came away with: $75K, $89K, and $83K respectively.

Now there are all sorts of problems with this type of quick-and-dirty analysis, but the pattern that emerges as you play out the types of job descriptions more aligned with this new era of digital collectivism against their predecessors is that Larnier is right— digital collectivism is no panacea for making a living.

A similar theme has emerged around the notion of "digital sharecroppers" or platform purveyors that leverage millions of small user contributions to build accrue most of the value for themselves. With the exception of eBay, and possibly Google (until now), this seems to be the case among all of the other "platforms" that have emerged in the last decade. So much so in fact, that I often tend to read the vision of many of these platforms, "X is going to democratize Y," as "X is going to really reap the investments of users who will do Y for next to nothing."

Examples:

Facebook is going to democratize communications and publishing = Facebook is going to reap the creative investment of users who will pour their lives into the largest privacy violation cesspool ever known to man.

Apple is democratizing mobile applications = Apple is going to reap the hundreds of millions of hours invested by developers for apps that are either free or sell for next to nothing so that they can maintain and possibly widen their lead selling expensive small computers.

The combination of these two trends makes Larnier's parting message in the piece something we should all be paying close attention to:

The owners of big computer resources on the Internet, like Google, will be able to make money from the open approach for a long time, of course, by routing advertisements, but middle-class people will be increasingly asked to accept a diet of mere kudos. No one should feel insulated from this trend. Poverty has a way of trickling up. Once everyone is aggregated, what will be left to be advertised?

Certainly worth at least keeping in mind as we plow forward into this brave new world.