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By: Adam Greenfield
“Independent content provider.”
Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Feisty and incorruptible-sounding,
along the lines of “indie record label.” And yet professional,
even clinical, in a crisp new-century way, like “primary healthcare
provider.”
What the phrase tends to obscure is the human beings involved are
— not always, but frequently — nothing more or less than
writers. Now, as an epithet for writer, the term is a distinct
improvement on those which earlier ages offered up — certainly
better than the unflattering “hack”; infinitely more accurate
than “ink-stained wretch” for someone whose job may after
all involve stoking an XML feed. But what it fails to address is how
the individuals involved are supposed to maintain their vaunted independence,
in a world where there are ever rents to be paid, college loans to
be retired, dental bills to settle.
For centuries, at least since the emergence in the West of the literary
archetype — that consumptive figure hunched over the spattered
pages strewn across the makeshift desk of his garret, ink freezing
in the well — there’s been a general understanding that
while the writer’s role may well involve standing in loyal opposition
to the culture in which they operate, there is some hope of financial
reward involved. Only cranks, mystics, revolutionaries and wealthy
dilettantes wrote without some form of pecuniary support, whether
patronage, salary, direct sales, residuals, or the penny-a-word piecework
compensation offered by pulp-magazine editors.
hacks and hackers
The Internet changed all that. The Internet, and especially its conjoined
offspring, the World Wide Web, lowered or eliminated the traditional barriers
to entry, making independent one-to-very-many publishing both technically feasible
and popularly accessible. Even before Blogger, a writer whose fanzine scrawls
might have reached a maximum audience of a few hundred had the ability to throw
up a few HTML pages and thus reach a potential audience of tens of millions,
worldwide. At the moment this became possible, two stubbornly deep-rooted cultures
were set on a collision course, and ever since, those of us who write for
the medium have stood in an uneasy relationship to the fruits of our labor.
In the famous terms of the hacker ethos espoused by those whose efforts
gave us the Net’s theoretical and technical underpinnings, information
“wants to be free.” Practically speaking, this meant not
merely free-as-in-unrestricted, but free-as-in-zero-cost. You offered
the community and the world beyond your “content” because
you had figured out some particularly elegant hack; your reward was
the incremental growth of your reputation, with guru status and net.godhead
waiting at the summit. Someone expressing an expectation that he or
she be directly compensated for whatever insight or point of view
they might have developed was held to be acting in bad taste, at the
very least.
By contrast, in writing and publishing, even the Whitmans and Selbys, the
Pynchons and Ackers and Sterlings made bank off their efforts, and why the hell not?
They might or might not have continued their output in the absence of a paycheck,
but writing was acknowledged to be a way to make a living. How good a
living, of course, stood in direct correlation to how many people reckoned with
your work: you reached a hundred thousand or a million readers, you got compensated
in like measure, however scruffy and disreputable you may have been personally.
These are clearly very different yardsticks by which to measure worth.
never the twain shall meet?
For a short while, it seemed as if the Internet and the almighty dollar
had come to some sort of rapprochement. The dot-com boom of 1997-2000
— primarily driven by excitement around the high-speed, low-drag
moneymaking potential of e-commerce, where all things Web came with
business plans attached and a first round of VC funding on the way
— did a lot to break the back of the original hacker purity
of spirit. The term “micropayment” got its first airing.
And maybe somewhere in there, there would be room between the greedheads
and the techno-Marxist ascetics for a hard-working, independent-minded
writer to turn a buck without having to whore themselves out.
The massive collapse of the dreams of ’99, and the utter and
unlamented failure of most corporate
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