Paying makes it better
How art, journalism, dead cats and Henry Kissinger teach us that we need to pay for quality to preserve it.
Two weeks ago I quit my Silicon Valley desk job. I spent the first weekend Skyping friends and family in the UK — letting them know I’d taken the plunge — and I’ve spent the last twelve days actually trying to articulate to myself why I believe in my new gig; working with 5 other crazy people to convince everyone in the world that they should pay real hard-earned non-doge-coin money for digital art by digital artists.
One of my best friends is a journalist who works for a well-known international newspaper. We went to college together, live in the same city, drink together frequently, and in general have a lot of common ground. I’m writing this because I believe that the reason we don’t pay for art online is the same reason hardly any of us pay to read the news online.
Here’s the problem — as neatly as I can frame it:
We get so much for free already, and what we’ve gotten up till now has been pretty good.
Now on the surface I’ll agree, that doesn’t sound like too much of a problem. Back in the day access to fine art was the preserve of an elitist upper class, and access to information was more firmly in the hands of governments - what we were told came from a few institutions that we had to trust, and it was often impossible to know what was happening on the other side of the world. These days, though, you can find almost any image you want just by googling it, and Youtube and Twitter allow individuals to report what’s going on almost anywhere at any time to the rest of the online world. This, for the record, is all good.
What we should really care about is the second part of that problem statement. The content we’ve gotten till now has been pretty good, but there’s no guarantee that we’ll continue to be able to find content which is as creative, art which is as experimental and challenging, or journalism which is as meaningful or enlightening. In fact, with the exponential growth in the volume of content online (the ‘fire hose’ of information on the Internet), it’s increasingly likely that what we’ll be exposed to is inaccurate, awful or (worse) mundane. We worry that we’re being buried by trash.
There’s a fundamentalist vanguard out there who would have us grab our pitchforks at this point, and go burn down Buzzfeed HQ; skewering any lolcats and shiba inu we find along the way. Since time immemorial people have believed that unholy coven of the media and young people have been responsible for a dumbing down of society. And it’s seductive to align with a (counter?)counterculture; to believe it’s you against a gif-consuming majority, trying to bring back intellectualism and educated conversation. But being media luddites doesn’t make sense. You can’t burn down the Internet, and it’s naïve to think that we want to revert to a time when only established newspapers could tell you what to think. Tempting as it was, I didn’t leave my cushy job to go on a highly literate crusade against cute animals.
I left my job because of Henry Kissinger. Kind of.
I heard Kissinger speak at the end of 2013, not by choice. He was — bizarrely — a guest speaker at a company talk, and after some heady reminiscences about his days diplomatising with Mao Zedong turned his attention to the Interwebs. He told us that we in Silicon Valley were responsible for opening up a veritable Pandora’s Box of content; bringing information and communication to the world, but unleashing a tide (or unstopping a fire-hose) of trivia and trash online that was washing away our ability to find things of any real value. This he proclaimed, and then shuffled offstage, leaving behind a somewhat bewildered audience, who hadn’t really expected someone like Kissinger to be there at all, let alone have him chastise them for Rebecca Black and Philosoraptor.
Kissinger was right and Kissinger was wrong. The Internet had allowed for a hitherto unimaginable production of content — much of it of questionable value — but it couldn’t simply be the democratisation of access to information that was leading to a decline in quality. By simply observing content online, could we really be making it worse? Right or wrong (or both), Kissinger’s surreal cameo in my life had got me thinking. Thinking about cats.
Erwin Schrödinger was a physicist who (fortunately for cats) only ever owned a hypothetical one. His famous thought problem claimed that without knowing whether a hidden cat was alive or dead, it essentially existed in both hypothetical states at once. He asked us to imagine that if the cat was hidden in a box separate from the universe, with some radioactive material that had a 50% chance of decaying and releasing a hammer that would crush the cat (because physicists like to make things weirdly complicated), then we couldn’t know for sure whether the hammer had fallen unless we opened the box and observed the cat, forcing it to conform to one of the two states and eliminating the uncertainty.
Why am I telling you this? Well, to cut a long story short I realised that over time just observing (or consuming) content online actually has had a vast impact on its quality, especially journalism or editorial work which is free to view. Because it’s free to view, and free news websites rely on advertising to fund their business, every eyeball (or two) on that news article is generating revenue. More eyeballs equals more money, and so eyeballs become the currency; in the short term publishers are overwhelmingly incentivised to craft their content around what most people look at, rather than what is meaningful, useful or informative to them. That’s why in August 2013, with civil unrest in Egypt, civil war in Syria, and the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, CNN.com chose to run instead with Miley Cyrus’ MTV twerk-fest on their front page. At the time, The Onion wrote a scathing satirical op-ed that was right on the money.
The same is true of the visual arts. It used to be that physical reproductions of paintings, full-colour spreads in newspapers, or photographic prints were immensely expensive to make, so you had to make sure that what you were printing was worth it (remember when your camera could only take 36 pictures before you had to replace the film?). Now, the only cost in creating something visual and publishing it so the whole world can see is your own time, maybe a camera, and maybe that Photoshop license. And we as consumers of this content have been so unused to having to pay for visual content online that human eyeballs on the frontend (and advertising dollars on the backend) have been the only way publishers have been able to stay in business.
The shift isn’t in the physicality of the work, it’s that we don’t pay for it.
I’m not saying that Miley Cyrus, 9gag.com and lolcats are evil (at least, not 9gag.com and lolcats). What I’m saying is that when we as human beings are the product (when someone is paying for our eyeballs, rather than us paying for the content) we lose the ability to articulate what we value. Eyeballs can’t talk; money does. All eyeballs are created equal, but supporting something by paying for it allows you to make a disproportionate statement that you care about it. It gives the artist or journalist who receives the money creative freedom to push boundaries and challenge us, rather than forcing them to pander to silent eyeballs and advertisers. Our eyeballs are the Internet’s transactional currency; how publishers trade with advertisers for online display space and homepage takeovers. Money, for better or worse, is how we vote for what matters.
Cost creates value. It sounds counterintuitive, but over time it’s true. If people are paying money for something, there’s an incentive for everyone else to do more of that thing better. In the short term you get some carpet-bagging and opportunism; the huge desire for talented and creative designers in Silicon Valley right now means that everyone and their uncle is styling themselves as a designer, with mixed results. Long-term, though, that desire encourages more people to actually train as designers, which pushes up quality, which makes the quality of design better overall.
The Internet allows us to connect with people anywhere else in the world who share our passions, whether we’re into photography, comic books, journalism or activist, and the network effect of this global online audience who care about what you care about means that just a few dollars from each person is more than enough to give creative people the resources they need to push boundaries, rather than recycling tired memes.
Benefactor 2.0
Existing inertia, and a lingering cryptoanarchist mindset that a) free is good b) the Internet gives us access to things for free therefore c) free things on the Internet must be good, has prevented us thus far from acknowledging that to protect a robust, free-thinking media and an avant-garde, creative art movement we still need to support things that we value. Wealthy philanthropists like Pierre Omidyar recognise this, and are triaging investigative journalism with huge donations. Kickstarter and IndieGogo are living examples that there is money to be made helping people crowdfund arts projects, and Medium.com itself demonstrates a strong intellectual desire to rebuild an ailing ecosystem of thoughtful, longform content.
None of these efforts can succeed, though, without an engine for creativity and curiosity that is powered by all of us. We read the news, and we like seeing and sharing beautiful, creative, challenging things, but we’re also each passionate about something, and if we care about stopping the arts and the media going to seed, we are duty-bound to encourage those passions where we see them in other people and other places.
Shiba inus and honey badgers are here to stay. It’s more than ok to love them, and there’s an unending army of people on the Internet willing to produce them for you for free. Great art, experimental music and, frankly, dangerously groundbreaking journalism, though, need the support of people that care about them. Paying for this content keeps it alive and helps it thrive, it makes us think differently and challenges our prejudice and, most importantly, it ensures that the people who can create it keep trying to make it better, which over time pushes our cultural heritage forward.
Building that economy is why I left the safety of my air-conditioned office and the posture-improving smugness of my standing desk. If you feel the same way you don’t have to quit your job and tell everyone about it, but next time you’re given a chance to pay someone for something you care about, realise that you’re not just helping them, you’re helping make it better for everyone.
