Why enclosure of the Medium commons is wrong
Having written extensively on enclosure of the Medium commons, I will give a brief summary and encourage to read the articles appended below.
It may not have been the intention of Ev Williams and a bunch of greedy Vulture Capitalists to create a collaborate commons, but that is what they have done.
A commons is the resource, the land, in this case the Medium platform, and the commoners.
A commons is the social interaction. Something Zelda Pinwheel grasped when she wrote:
Medium provided us the unique opportunity to create a community and we did. We found its true value, and in fact, created it ourselves. I’m not saying we should all throw money around, but let’s value ourselves, our work, our words enough to say, “Hey. If you’re here and you’re reading and you want to, here’s a way to support the writers that make this community special.”
The Medium commoners are the readers and writers, often one and the same, and as we see here, one article can often lead to another.
People freely contribute, if they did not, the Medium commons would not exist.
Charging $5 per month, has nothing to do with rewarding writers, it is to satisfy the insatiable greed of Vulture Capitalists. And $5 is not the only fee you will be paying, you will also be paying to access publications.
The fee is not going to support the platform, it has sufficient funding for several years, nor is it going to support writers, who incidentally never asked for a penny. The money is going to inflate the value of Medium, in order that the Vulture Capitalists can sell out and make a fast buck.
To charge five dollars per month, that is $60 per year. To put that figure in context, annual subscription for Standart is 40 euros, for Dark Mountain £30 for an annual subscription.
Dark Mountain is an anthology of essays, short stories, poetry and art. The content variable, the art poor, badly reproduced, the writing too often pretentious unintelligible drivel. Launched through crowd funding, now funded through subscription, originally an annual publication, now twice yearly. Contributors do not get paid, they receive a free copy of Dark Mountain.
Standart is an excellent quarterly publication on coffee culture, can be found in coffee shops, or subscribe, 11 euros an issue. I do not know how the writers are paid.
These are hard copy publications, real costs, printing, distribution, shelving.
I was one of the privileged writers invited to be paid for my high quality writing. I declined, I did not wish to reside within a fenced of ghetto where people have to pay to gain access.
There was no consultation with the commoners.
Writers write to be read, they have something to say, which they wish to share, which they feel others may be interested to read.
We see paid for writers, hacks who write ill-informed garbage to fill out column inches in the mainstream media.
And how are these writers chosen, who chooses what will be paid for content?
Creation of what David Graeber calls bullshit jobs to do the choosing.
The biggest reward for any writer, is knowing people are reading what they have written.
Something we can all do, if we see something worth reading, recommend, tweet, share with our friends. That way we increase the signal to noise ratio of quality writing which is currently drowned out by the rubbish.
I am editor of several publications on Medium, if areas of interest then please follow, recommend, share.
FairPay cards in action in Heraklion
We take our life on our hands through self-management!
medium.com
I have no problem with a mechanism if readers wish to pay for a particular article or writer. And please make the payment in faircoin.
Bandcamp is a useful model. To listen on-line is free, to download, can set a low price or even zero and the person downloading sets the price.
Bandcamp works because it was established to benefit musicians, has no involvement of Vulture Capitalists out to make a fast buck.
Internet was created as a global collaborative commons, not a money making endeavour. Which is why, as Charles Eisenstein discusses in Sacred Economics, few make money from the internet.
Medium could be open source software, an open coop, distributed network, hosted on a platform coop.
In principle, I am in favour, but with guarded reservations having the last few days been using Mastodon, an alternative to twitter and experienced its many problems.
Mastodon is financed through Patreon.
Jewelia, one of the singer-songwriters on bandcamp, seeks patrons through Patreon, though she could do the same through bandcamp, as does bass player Steve Lawson.
Medium could have the tools, where can create collections, printed at local nodes, for which a fee is paid to obtain a printed bound copy.
Pensar desde los comunes, the Spanish edition of Think Like a Commoner, was published in this manner, crowdfunded, then printed locally, with free e-book, translation from English to Spanish by Guerrilla Translation, a P2P translation collective and cooperative founded in Spain.
Charles Eisenstein, in keeping with his idea of a Gift Economy, gift to others with no expectation of return, you can purchase Sacred Economics from a bookshop (if you can find), download as an e-book (pay what you wish), or download for free. I downloaded for free, paid him back by recommending to others, and more recently, have purchased two copies, one for myself, one to be given to a friend as a gift.
James Hoffmann, author of The World Atlas of Coffee, is crowdfunding selected writings from his blog Jim Seven to be published as a bound hardback to compliment The World Atlas of Coffee. Limited edition, signed copies, plus a low cost e-book.
The question we should all be asking, does Ev Williams wish to support a platform dedicated to quality writing, which was his original concept?
If yes, he could support it out of small change and not even notice.
It is us the commoners who make Medium viable, if not, it would not exist.
Therefore extend that concept to open source, open coop, collaborative commons, and implement policies that make it sustainable.
If that means, Vulture Capitalists get burnt, that is a beneficial collateral damage.
If Medium is to survive as a collaborative commons, there needs to be some radical thinking, charging for access is not the answer, it would be a retrograde step. Ev Williams may well say, someone has to provide the land, in this case the platform, on which the commoners exercise their commoners rights.
This may be true, in the past a lord or maybe held in common by the community, but think of innovative ways to provide the platform, open source software to which all can contribute, crowdfund to raise the funds, make an appeal, organise as an open coop, enable payment if readers wish to pay, but always retain free access.
Linux and its associated suite of programs runs the internet. Developers freely contribute, the software is free to use.
Post-capitalism, we are moving away from failed neo-liberalism, towards open coops, collaborative commons. Medium are going against the trend. It as though post-capitalism does not exist.
Ev Williams needs to think again.
