I, Content Provider

Jaron Lanier has an op-ed in the New York Times in which he admits, as a onetime member of the 1990s "information wants to be free" crowd, that in fact he was wrong and we'll all be better off with people actually getting paid for "content providing."

There’s an almost religious belief in the Valley that charging for content is bad. The only business plan in sight is ever more advertising. One might ask what will be left to advertise once everyone is aggregated.

How long must creative people wait for the Web’s new wealth to find a path to their doors? A decade is a long enough time that idealism and hope are no longer enough. If there’s one practice technologists ought to embrace, it is the evaluation of empirical results.

To help writers and artists earn a living online, software engineers and Internet evangelists need to exercise the power they hold as designers. Information is free on the Internet because we created the system to be that way.

We could design information systems so that people can pay for content — so that anyone has the chance of becoming a widely read author and yet can also be paid. Information could be universally accessible but on an affordable instead of an absolutely free basis.

How profoundly annoying and offensive did I find the "information wants to be free" mentality, during the dotcom bubble period? God. I shouldn't get started on it. But I will.

At the time, I was a college student with dreams of making a living drawing comics, who sort of got diverted onto the internet because it was there, because it was someplace to find an audience and get feedback. And boy did I get tired of being told that my desire to be paid was some sort of second-wave old-media dinosaur fascism.

I got this lecture repeatedly. Information wants to be free. Intellectual property is an outmoded concept. Why, I, from my job as a silicon valley software engineer making six figures, sometimes write open source software! So you, as a content provider, have no right to ask anyone for a dime ever for your work.

It never seemed to occur to these people that the quality of art and literature was inevitably going to plummet if we created a society where nobody could ever make a living at them. I'd point this out, then be accused of an "irrational bias against new media."

And I'd walk away sort of stunned at any ideology that considers the desire to be paid a living wage "irrational."

That Jaron Lanier is writing something like this ten years on is interesting. I actually had no idea it was still an article of faith in the Valley that people like me have no right to expect a dime for our hard work. I kind of thought that idea had died, or at least receded, when so many of its advocates got a big dose of reality in 2000/2001.

I suppose the lesson here is the usual lesson. Don't trust futurists. They're not trying to screw you over, it'll just take them ten years to notice how badly they have.