Raving Rant: Close the World, Open the Next - Editorial

Axel Cushing is about to blow your pay-for-play mind...

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Raving Rant: Close the World, Open the Next

Boy: "The Wired can never interfere with the real world!"

Lain: "No matter where you are, everyone is always connected."

-"Serial Experiments Lain"

Pretty much anywhere in the world that has an economy not based on barter is feeling the effects of what is arguably the biggest financial crisis in the last hundred years. It's not like the dot-com bubble popping back around the turn of the millennium. It's likely worse than the crash of 1929 which precipitated the Great Depression and all the financial misery which would prove to be an overture to WWII. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seemingly have traded in the gaudy costumes of War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death for soberly cut Brooks Brothers suits and business cards that read Credit Crisis, Housing Crisis, Energy Crisis, and Environmental Crisis. And yes, I know, the games industry is probably the one area of the world economy that hasn't fallen into the toilet. One could argue that current issues in companies like Sony and Microsoft might ultimately reverberate through the entertainment sector and cause us to feel a unique species of pain, but that's probably not going to happen for a little while yet. By that point, though, everything else will probably be so bad that we'll doubtlessly have bigger problems to worry about.

In the midst of the endless litany of dire news, it's tempting as all hell to foresee only the bad things, the pain, the trouble, the sacrifices we have to make just to get by. We forget that the worst possible moments often lead to some great benefits and great discoveries. Some people look at a forest fire and think only of the trees burned down, the property destroyed, and the land scorched beyond recognition. We forget that you can't have new growth without burning down some of the old growth first. And so it is with the current economic troubles. The brambles and undergrowth are going to get burned out and very likely take a chunk of the forest with it. Property will be damaged if not destroyed. Lives will be lost, sometimes

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quite literally. It's what happens after all this destruction that holds my interest.

Recently, Walter Isaacson of Time put out an article entitled "How To Save Your Newspaper." At first glance, it doesn't seem to have anything to do directly with the current economic crisis. It seems to be a long winded, albeit very nicely written, polemic about why the print

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editions of newspapers and magazines are dying and the web editions need to start charging subscription fees after nearly a decade of generally being free to read. Isaacson points out that, prior to the ascendancy of the commercial Internet, online services like AOL and CompuServe made it easier for magazines and newspapers to make money because of the per-minute fee structure of those services. He points out that Tim Nelson, the man largely considered to be the father of hypertext, did have a plan in mind for content creators to get paid when people brought up new items by clicking on links. And he makes the case that if ad support is the only leg a content provider's "stool" has to stand on, then that content provider is doomed to die in these unsettled economic times as ad revenues go down and advertisers reduce their budgets.

What Isaacson fails to take into account are some basic facts that should be given serious consideration before trying to make predictions about the future. For one thing, the paradigm that has driven the expansion of the Internet at an absolutely mind-blowing rate is that content and information has predominantly been free of charge. Whatever value the "walled gardens" of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy may have given major magazines in establishing an electronic presence, it was ultimately doomed to failure once the Internet opened up to the masses. Even if Time had resisted at first, or even remained a long time holdout, it would have been futile. At best, Time would have done pretty much what it ended up doing, though maybe going through a period where they tried an online subscription before finally caving in and going free. At worst, somebody would have ended up creating the news magazine equivalent of Napster: P2P article sharing. Yeah, you laugh now, but when you look at the proliferation of MP3 file sharing not as a vast criminal conspiracy but a natural evolution of the desire to share music with your buddies through mix tapes or CDs, it suddenly becomes a lot more plausible that people would swap articles from newspapers and magazines through a P2P setup. People like exposing their friends to new music. People like to pass along information about topics (and opinions on those topics) that they care about, or that their friends care about. And if you think I'm smoking something, when was the last time you got an email from a friend or family member that contained a link to a news website? It is precisely that sort of effortless transmission of information that helped turn the Internet from barely known scientific resource to the virtually indispensable communications medium of the 21st Century.

To try and further bolster his argument, Isaacson recalls a letter from Bill Gates back in 1976, sent to a computer club that was sharing the code to Altair BASIC. The quote used was this: "One thing you do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" Not a bad line if your intended reader is somebody who has basically been sleepwalking through the last decade or so. Linux, BeOS, Blender, and the open source releases for Quake and other games have all ultimately produced what is arguably professional work. Blender, in particular, is one of those under the radar success stories: a rendering program that can match what the big studios put out that started off as a commercial product, died in the marketplace, and was reborn under open source. This does not count the explosive growth of the game mod community, which produces results that sometimes equal or surpass the output from the professional game houses, and all very much for free. For all of his hand wringing about professional grade work essentially given away for nothing, Bill Gates had absolutely no problem giving away Internet Explorer when it became apparent that nobody was going to buy it, and when it became apparent that Netscape was kicking its ass both commercially and in the free versions people were getting when they signed up with an ISP. I'm curious if the programmers who toiled away in the cubicle farms of Redmond to create Internet Explorer appreciated their professional work being given away by their boss.

The inescapable fact of the matter is this: the genie is out of the bottle as far as free content on the Internet goes. Yes, subscription services continue proliferate and sites that have them either come up with content that justifies that subscription cost, eventually go to a free ad-supported model, or they die out. It's capitalism. It's Darwinism. It's the invisible hand of the markets patting the heads of content providers that let people read for free. It's that same invisible hand cold-cocking content providers who cannot or will not adjust their costs to reflect the demand or improve their content to increase demand. Right now, peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians is more likely to happen than the governing ethos of the Internet moving to a "pay-for-play" mindset.

I find myself possessed of what some might consider to be a contradictory philosophy. On the one hand, I'm very much a firm believer that most forms of information should be freely available to pretty much anybody who cares to look, the exceptions being personal information which an individual deems private and information which legitimately deals with national security. I don't need to know when the CEO of a Fortune 500 company bought a latte at Starbuck's, but transparency on decisions that the CEO makes which might have impact on the state of the economy isn't unreasonable. I don't need to know every detail of a Pentagon program to develop a new weapons system, but it's definitely in the public interest to know if they're throwing good money after bad on an essentially unproductive program. On the other hand, I'm also a firm believer that people should get paid for their work. If I write a novel, I would very much like to get paid commensurate with the number of copies sold. If I write an op-ed piece for my local newspaper, it's not unreasonable that I get a check for my work. Journalists with regular columns and assignments have eat and pay the rent just like anybody else, and they did spent a boatload of money going to college and majoring in journalism in order to pursue a paying career in the field. To further complicate things, there is to my mind an equally puzzling set of contradictions. On the one hand, not all content is created equal. Some pieces of information are more important than others, depending on circumstances. On the other hand, data is very much created equal. When you get down to it, it's ones and zeros. Dictating which strings of ones and zeros should cost more to send or receive is anathema to the current way the Internet works. It's almost a throwback to the pre-ISP days.

Another issue which Isaacson fails to consider is the ethical duty owed to the public by news media outlets. Yes, they're a business, and they have bills to pay, but they're also supposed to be the first line of public inquiry regarding the operation of government. They're supposed to be asking questions and disseminating the answers to the public so that we might have an informed electorate. Suppose Woodward and Bernstein had decided that they weren't going to investigate the Watergate break-in because they figured that there wasn't any money in it. Would Nixon have completed his second term? Would Ford have run for the Presidency, much less been elected? And what would have happened if nobody had bothered to cover the events and aftermath of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or Cyclone Nargis? What would the result of any election be if nobody was out there talking to the candidates? The price a journalist must pay for the right to ask questions of those in power is to report the answers, even if he doesn't make a dime off them. Otherwise, we don't have anything resembling a democracy.

Finally, I believe Isaacson's attempt to equate Tim Nelson's Xanadu project with pay-for-play Internet schemes doesn't really hold much water. In Nelson's Xanadu system, micropayments would be made whenever you followed a link and accessed a new document. However, and this is something that I don't believe has ever been properly delineated by Nelson or his team, there is no distinction made between documents whose content was made for commercial purposes, documents which are intended for public information, and documents which contain content already in the public domain. If you're going to get a copy of Macbeth through the Xanadu system, it would very likely cost you quite a bit of money, even with micropayments. And should somebody really be forced to pay to get information such as federal warnings of an impending disaster?

Moreover, for larger works, what is stopping the provider from charging a user in perpetuity for accessing a copy of the document that they've already paid for once? As novelists and musicians have learned, when you sell a copy of a book or a CD, you get paid once. Once the person who bought it no longer has any use for it, they don't sell it back to the author or band, they get rid of it. They sell to used bookstores. They sell at garage sales. They put things up on eBay. This is known as the "secondary market," and only a fool would think that the Internet or a Xanadu-esque system could eliminate this market. It is the height of avarice to believe that you deserve to get paid forever for your works in all their shapes and forms. It's precisely that sort of thinking which led Sonny Bono to write the current copyright laws (at least in the States) which effectively lock up intellectual property until it's died of old age and decayed to dust. It flies in the face of diminishing returns. It's a government subsidy of the most insidious sort: the kind that purports to be for the good of the country when it does nothing of the sort.

Trying to figure out how best to proceed under these tumultuous financial circumstances is obviously a matter of great importance. Equally important, however, is figuring out how to proceed once the crisis is over and we're at a point of relative stability. We cannot let the actions taken in the midst of disaster set the policies we live under after we've survived. I imagine that the journalistic landscape, and indeed the entire media landscape, will be radically altered over the next ten years. What that landscape looks like and how we are to survive in it, I cannot say. My only thought is this: a good chunk of the current financial mess was built upon the premise of endless revenue streams, the belief that the money will always be flowing in, that companies will always make a profit, and the values of properties both physical and intellectual would always increase. Perhaps we need to shift our perspective from endless streams to transactional moments. Discrete points where an item is transferred from party A to party B without any extraneous effort, without expectation that the item will somehow keep sending money back to party A even as it travels from B to C to D and so on. Once A lets it go out the door, the door closes, and a new one opens up to reveal a new B. Such a model is probably better for the economy, and the world, than the one that we're stuck with now. Sooner or later, the fires will die down and the new growth will come in. I'm deeply curious to see how it looks.

- Axel Cushing

(March 25, 2009)