• Jaron Lanier is the author of You Are Not a Gadget and “father of virtual reality” considers whether writers and “content” creators can make a living in the Digital Age.
• Lanier argues against mashups and content fragmentation, saying, “economic incentives will be in favor of supporting individuals instead of . . . a collective vision.”
Interview by Mike Springer
As paper and ink give way to electronic gadgetry, questions arise. What will reading be like in the future? Will long-form prose survive? Will the quality of literature get better or worse? To Jaron Lanier, those are the wrong questions.
“The crucial question,” he said, ”ultimately has to do with power. If the future is one in which writers are not paid, then it also is one in which writers lack clout. And if it’s a future in which writers lack clout, then what we have is a lack, basically, of an intellectual middle class. Instead we have a sort of volunteer intellectual class, which in terms of clout starts to resemble peasants.”
Earlier this year Alfred A. Knopf published Lanier’s manifesto, You Are Not a Gadget, in which the musician and digital technologist — famously known as “the father of virtual reality” — attempts to reign in some of the euphoria over Web 2.0 with a sobering analysis of its darker implications for the future of authorship, individuality, and the socioeconomics of creative work. We caught up with Lanier recently with a list of questions. We wanted to hear his views on a variety of topics centered around the emerging technologies and their effect on books and publishing, but throughout the conversation Lanier kept returning to a single issue: whether writers and other “content” creators will be able to make a living in the Digital Age.
“If somebody can actually get their kids through college writing for screens, for e-books, then the thing is working,” said Lanier. “If they can’t, it isn’t. That’s a crucial initial threshold we have to pass to even have this discussion.”
In Lanier’s view, a strong intellectual middle class is essential to democracy. “This was demonstrated with incredible power just weeks ago by the exposé in The New Yorker on the Koch brothers,” said Lanier. “They were able to apply a rather modest amount of money and very little time in order to buy the blogosphere and the Twittersphere for their political cause.” The article, “Covert Operations; The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama,” describes how, in the last decade, industrialists Charles and David H. Koch transitioned from an earlier strategy of creating “independent” think tanks, such as The Cato Institute, to the founding and funding of “grass-roots” organizations, such as Americans for Prosperity, in a systematic campaign to promote their libertarian ideology. Lanier pointed out that the author of the story, Jane Mayer, was on contract with a traditional publishing outlet. “Bloggers couldn’t find that themselves,” he said, “because they’re corrupted, or they couldn’t afford to spend the time.”
Popular Internet culture, said Lanier, offers creators a fool’s bargain: “We offer people fake flattery in exchange for them impoverishing themselves.” He wants a system in which creative intellectual workers of all types — software designers, scholars, journalists, artists — are paid for their work.
If current trends continue, Lanier writes in You Are Not a Gadget, the future of the book trade will be a grim one. “It is my hope that book publishing will continue remuneratively into the digital realm,” he writes. “But that will only happen if digital designs evolve to make it possible. As things stand, books will be vastly devalued as soon as large numbers of people start reading from an electronic device.”
Lanier has mixed views on some of the e-publishing business models that have been created so far. “As much as I admire on many levels, both in terms of marketing and design, what Apple and Amazon are doing, it’s not a long-term plan for civilization,” Lanier said. “The walled garden thing can’t last forever. It’s not sustainable. There has to be something similar to what Apple and Amazon are doing that’s a single, unified, universal store for everybody. There can still be a layer of publishers within that, and Apple and Amazon can be publishers within the universal system. But they can’t have monopoly channels.”
Despite his hope for a universal store, Lanier wants boundaries to protect the integrity of each author’s work. In general, he decries the “digital flattening of expression into a global mush” brought on by Web 2.0 software and the mashup culture. He opposes, for example, Kevin Kelly’s vision of a universal digital library in which “no book will be an island.”
“The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book, just as Kevin suggested,” writes Lanier in his book. “What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This happens today with a lot of content; often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video.”
The issue isn’t one of taste. “I want to define a line,” said Lanier, “between subjective judgment of what future generations might like or care about, and just this basic functioning mechanism of civilization and culture. If it’s the case that future generations don’t like things the length of books, and prefer things that have a graph structure and are made of little pieces, then my hope is that whatever they do with that is done well. But what I think is crucial for it to be sustainable, and to be more than a single generation’s fling before the collapse of civilization, is that whatever they do respects the integrity of each personal point of view and grants the idea of personhood with an almost mystical stature.”
Ultimately, that “basic functioning mechanism” is economic. “If it turns out that writers can actually be paid,” said Lanier, “which means they can have clout and not be susceptible to corruption as we’ve seen previously, then I become highly optimistic, because some of the other things that I’m concerned about — of digital media erasing the boundaries between different peoples’ thoughts and therefore erasing the integrity of personhood and separate points of view — all of those things will kind of go away, because the economic incentives will be in favor of supporting individuals instead of some sort of collective vision.”
To Lanier, the creation of economic incentives is more important than fighting piracy. “Just wagging your finger at people and telling them what not to do doesn’t work,” he said. “If you want to create a civil society in which people aren’t breaking into each other’s houses, those people have to have houses of their own, so that they know what it’s like to be broken into. They have to want to live in a society where houses aren’t broken into. The only way — the only way — to get to the point where piracy is reduced is if the people who are now pirating see an opportunity to gain because of other people’s lack of piracy.”
All of this will take time. “Creation of civil society is very tricky,” said Lanier. “It’s one of the hardest things we can do, but also one of the most rewarding and noble. I view it as something that would be a large struggle, and maybe a generational struggle comparable to founding a country.”
DISCUSS: Is Writing for the Web a “Fools Bargain”?
Photo credit: Mike Springer
13 Comments
As an aispiring writer I have to agree with the sentinments of this article.I have come up through the writing group pathway and am now on the University of Falmouth’s MA in Professional Writing.What I have experienced so far is:
1.Providing a 300 word health article per week, to a local paper, free, the payment being the privilige of being in print.
2.£50 from the BBC for two broadcasts of short stories.As well as the writing this involved recording after doing a hundred mile round trip.The parking costs and lunch involved on the day put me in the red on this one. At least they paid me something.
3.Being offered the opportunity to pay someone as much as I could afford, so they could ‘publish’ my book.
Writing is a living like any other profession:we have to eat, put a roof over our heads and raise our children.
“The sky is falling”. I’m 50 and the number of times I have heard that groan, or groaned it myself have become innumerable. Let’s be Darwinian for a moment. There are more writers, it is more competitive, there is more content, and like any business that has been turned into a commodity, margins have fallen, but overall volume is up. The “absolute” number of writers making money with writing is probably up. What they make each, is probably down. Where they make it is different now. Some writers will succeed (as a publisher we’re looking for those), most will not (as a publisher we try to winnow them out fast). Our belief is that the more that can play the writing game, the better it is for society, and the amount of money paid to writers is a function of supply and demand. Think about the churn and turnover on the NY Times bestseller lists.. more authors, less time. And yes, the sky is falling, but the new sky is higher, brighter, and more beautiful.
One of the publishing businesses I have for sale at Anvil Brokers has a single e-book as an asset. The e-book is about how to become a mortgage broker. Until the real estate crash of 2008, this single e-book business was hauling in $700,000 a year. Since the crash, fewer people are interested in becoming mortgage brokers, but the owner is still taking in around $400,000 a year. There are expenses, of course – primarily advertising. So yes, it is still possible to make a living as a writer. But you need to be smart about it. Think about the market. Most self-published books sell under 200 copies. Most books published by small presses sell under 2,000 copies. You can’t live on those royalties – and rare indeed are the writers who live on freelance income. Peter Bowerman has some excellent advice in his books about making a living as a freelancer or self-publisher. As for writing for free – good for publicity, but not for your pocketbook.
It has always been a tricky proposition for a writer to make a living– and send a child to college– solely on a writing income. Most aspiring writers cannot do it. I started long before the digital revolution, and when I started there were still publications that “paid copies” and breaking in meant writing for free to establish credentials. In all creative fields there have always been a small number whose consistent level of quality was recognized and valued enough to reward it with a living wage. How this is accomplished has changed from era to era. There was a time when you were chosen to be the court artist at the pleasure of a regent.
Because the digital landscape is new, good filters have not yet been developed to distinguish levels of quality. Eventually however certain basic needs of society tend to find a way to get met and systems are put in place to meet them. People continue to value writing that is of a skill level they trust and admire. They need filters they trust to help them distinguish the level of quality, and I am entirely confident that we will find a way to serve those needs and to keep the authors and the “filters” (now publishers but maybe something different in the future) working.
But it is always good to remember in these arguments that there was no golden era in the past when it was easy for writers to make a living entirely from their writing work.
IMHO if you want to make money writing then you need to be concentrating on advertisers not end-users. Advertisers will pay real money (not like the BBC exampel above) in order to be able to beat their competition, end-users want their reading for free (particularly the non-fiction segment). There are people making a good living by providing information for free to people and charging advertisers to advertise on their site. By ‘good living’ I don’t mean enough to run the NYT but I do mean enough to pay the mortgage, eat, fund yoru family’s education etc… So to wannabe writers or purveyors of useful information I advise looking into the advertising model – it doesn’t have to cost you a penny to get your own website/blog up and running and to start earning money whilst writing what you want to write about.
lots of dire predictions in this article but no specific ideas for going forward. just having an opinion isn’t too useful. the comment section was better.
When did writers ever have the power to make a living? What does it take to be a good writer? A paper and pencil and a quiet place to write, and a heart to guide you, where you can then write possibly the great American Novel which no one may ever see or care to see? And, who says one story is better than the other story if those who judge the story want money to read it and money to publish it? The pay that writers get today hasn’t changed for at least 30 years that I am aware of; it is pitiful: ten dollars here, twenty there; a hundred once in awhile. We live in a society that says listen to your head not your heart and hustle; make money and you can do anything you want, get your stories published; of course you can; when you own the publishing company. The only problem arises when you listen to your head and get the money and possessions. Now you own a publishing company and can publish all your own stories … oops wait a minute … what stories? Ah, you forgot to write them or you stopped writing them what with all the work making all the money or you never learned how to write them because you were too busy making money and so now you will listen to your head again, and forget your heart, publish the autobiography of some celebrities; that always makes money. And so, the system turns out more meaningless garbage as it is wont to do and always has. The only miracle is that every once in awhile a story is actually published somewhere that actually awakens our senses and touches our hearts.
As a self-published author I found that the practice of blogging to keep myself “out there” was in actuality a total waste of time, as it took away more of my creative writing time than I desired. Now I am collecting the articles and will publish them as a separate nonfiction book, much in the same tradition as Bertrand Russell and Mark Twain. I have to pay my rent and bills, too, and the expectation of readers that I give away content for free has caused me no end of frustration. Writers write for two reasons: the money and the intellectual stimulation. In this economy, where the jobless rate is kept high by selfish motivations, I have a right to be selfish, too. You don’t see the Wall Street bankers giving away anything for free. Maybe when people realize this they will stop expecting authors to give away their thoughts for free. Otherwise, communism will run rampant and there will be no reason to write; therefore, nothing for the people to read. Solchinitzen is probably rolling in his grave right now.
I *am* a gadget.
Daniel said: “There are people making a good living by providing information for free to people and charging advertisers to advertise on their site.”
I think a counterpoint is that there are more and more people doing that, plus copying and linking that information. This amount is growing faster than the advertising money available. You may want to read this article about it
http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i7f28928d88ce98bce853bfeff1deda31
Titled “Web Awash in Ads as Supply Outstrips Demand”
That is partly a result of Lanier seems to be saying.
Putting food on the table and a roof over their heads are really the only legitimate concerns that Lanier voices, because for all intents and purposes the cost of living is probably going to change dramatically as more and more of our consumption goes virtual, i.e. can be fed by “bits” alone. For example, with the rise of reputation systems online, it is entirely possible that the institution known as university begins to dissolve by 2020 as people no longer need a college degree to demonstrate their worth to society. That’s going to be one less living cost. They same quality of education will be available to the rich as to the poor. It’s likely that the cost of living with respect to physical goods also drops because they are going “digital” in their own way with the rise of stereolithography as a mode of production. Stereolithography eliminates the cost of intellectual property in physical goods. Everyone is going to be living well much cheaper in the future.
The problem with Lanier’s vision is that he fails to consider the impact that reputation systems and the continual rise of intellectual production will have on how economies function. In the future it will not only be monetary capital, but social capital that will be exchanged. I’d say that there are few professions that are better positioned to be “wealthy” in a world where the medium of exchange shifts from monetary capital to physical capital.
Assuming the rise of social capital as a way of measuring worth in society, those writers that focus on being BOTH great writers and highly knowledgeable about one area of human knowledge are going to be the most valuable. It’s those that follow a career of mediocrity (i.e. content farms) that are probably going to suffer the most. And I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing, since that type of content creates more noise than signal for us as a society.
We must remember that there are a lot more types of things to read than just books. Even comments on this thread can be considered competition for regular books, and I don’t think that is a bad thing. Writing in a way was one of the first forms of the codification of human knowledge and passing it along to others. Never in human history have had greater levels of cultural production today and more people writing. I’m participating in writing right now and I hardly consider my act a form of digital peasantry. Instead it’s incredibly liberating, since at no point earlier in human history would I have had the opportunity to publish my thoughts in a medium that would reach so many people.
P.S. Imagine if a reputation system were part o the publishing perspectives website and that I could receive “social capital” in the form of upvotes and likes on my answer. Such a system would increase my social capital in exchange for providing a thoughtful response to this discussion. Over time the accumulation of reputation especially in focused subject areas, would afford me a greater reputation that I can capitalize in other ways such as via consulting, speaking engagements and offers from others to write answers.
If anything, we’ve incredibly democratized the act of writing and given many many many more people the tools and “economy” necessary to be able to engage in this form of communication.
http://choosecreativecommerce.wordpress.com/
well Im not gonna disagree–;0 then again some said this 15-20 years ago.and others way, way before “pcs” and “webs”
machines can only do. humans can “not”
which do you think those “with” will keep spending on?
we get what we value.