Andrew Keen predicts the end of "free labor" online
Andrew Keen wrote an unintentionally funny essay about how the bad economy is going to make people stop contributing content online unless they get paid for it.
(As Jesse Walker at Reason says, "Because that's why most people contribute to YouTube and Wikipedia. It's the reason why people post comments here at Hit & Run. 'Back end' revenue! It's the American dream!")So how will today's brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 "free" economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google, TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc. , Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism... The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some "back end" revenue. "Free" doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.
Keen doesn't realize the power of egoboo. Richard Eney wrote in his 1959 Fancyclopedia II that science fiction fandom "may be defined as an infinitely complex system for the production of pure egoboo." The same can be said for the Web, too.
the latest
latest episodes
Keen is so wrong.
Andrew Keen: Always wrong about everything.
Now, now. Keensian economics has always had its critics.
Did someone just say "egoboo?" 'Cause I think I just heard someone say "egoboo."
I think he also underestimates the lure of being able to produce whatever the hell you want without people telling you what to do.
I've been on the internet since I was 19, had a website since I was 20. While I've been a graphics monkey for most of that, I've still released my personal art for free (often as desktops and wallpapers) on the net. I ran a free webcomic for about a year and a half--while unemployed. People ask me all the time if they can turn my art into icons or forum avatars. (Generally I say yes.) A few factors mean that a large portion of my work will remain free for people to ogle and use on their desktops.
a-I'm not well-known enough yet for me to put barriers up for people to access my work yet....and charging for it seems to be one way of restricting access.
b-I don't have anyone telling me what to create or how to create it (barring people in critique groups, but they aren't doing it because of some mysterious demographic tendency or a revenue or a bottom line).
c-I like people to see experience my work soon after I put it out there. The comments and whatnot keep my butt in the chair and productive.
d-I LIKE doing it.
e-Egoboo is nice too.
I imagine other people offering freebies have similar reasons for keeping their work free. It doesn't mean that I don't do paying work, but it doesn't mean that the fount of freebies is gonna dry up either.
I think Andrew Keen has a pathological hatred of free internet content because he subconsciously realizes that much of it is better than anything he has ever produced. This makes him bitter and fearful, which explains his douchebaggery, but does not excuse it.
He reminds me of Dvorak. I'd say he's shilling for somebody.
I thought in hard times people were more willing to do things to help out for free? (Because they have nothing else to do, and they might get some unexpected benefits for their free contributions?)
It is mostly in economically successful times that people get more obsessed with how big their winnings can become.
Others have made the point -in various blogs around the 'series of tubes'- that the flagging economy will put an end to Free/Open Source Software (FOSS), because the beardos who live in their parent's basement will want to get paid for their work.
I have a really clever comment to make about this but I would like to receive a paypal donation first.
Apropos of nothing really, but Keen's picture makes me want to punch him in the face.
That'll be two cents, please.
Wait! We're not getting paid for this?!?
And - am I the only one who thinks that "back end revenue" sounds a bit dirty?
People without a lot of money do all this stuff now. Why would they stop just because there's more of them?
Great going Keen. Because we all know the commercial side of the internet came before the free side, right?
Did I mention just how wrong Keen is?
Of course we are getting paid, we are getting paid in theoretical internet dollars.
I just want to know if he's getting paid for this... and who's paying him?
I think he's off the deep end. But... I think people will be turning to online sources of revenue more and more.
I think "tip jars" might be a worthy thing again.
Also I had a few eBay auctions end low and a few folks actually paid me a few dollars more because they felt the ending price was too low.
I think in general people will have to start to appreciate work-a-day efforts more and more.
It's only been going on for a few weeks and I'm already 100% sick of the great depression fear-mongering.
Guess what! During the actual great depression, there were people who did work for nothing.
Why does Keen think that everyone approaches internet culture in the same way that he once did? Obviously they don't, since there are successful web sites that still exist.
Will Keen stop writing if no one buys his crap anymore?
He looks like Drew Barrymore's fiancee in "The Wedding Singer." Besides, everybody knows British people don't know anything about the Internet.
@ PresterJohn - Dvorak??? The 19th Century Czech composer of symphonies, piano and chamber music?
OK, I just googled. Never mind.
pay? How very...common. All this talk of vulgar commerce. I myself am quite content with all those gossamer,infinitesimal wisps I strip away from the manna of all who visit here. Rather like collecting bits of string, really.
Plenty of the work we do, particularly women, is unpaid - for ourselves, for our family, for our friends, for our neighbours, for society at large. It doesn't get counted because it doesn't serve 'The Economy', and it isn't taxed by the government.
It seems to me that 'The Economy' uses the people at the bottom of the pyramid to enrich the people at the top, with the promise of 'Trickle Down' to keep those of us towards the bottom alive.
- I have witheld the rest of my rant -
Does that mean that this is a bad time to ask for a raise?
Cage match with Yochai Benkler!
Oh my God! I cannot stand this guy! I listened to him rant against 14 year olds (?!?) commandeering all of human knowledge on the SETI "Are We Alone?" podcast a little while back.
He is totally like one of those old tweedy-sleeved white guys in the 70s who were pissed off that women and people of color were being introduced into the "Canon". What a bag of wind!
My favorite part of the interview was something about how it was now fashionable to be ignorant, and all the people online were flaunting their ignorance proudly while at the same time Keen was upset that "unqualified" people were striving to contribute their knowledge to (the Wikipedia for instance). If it is fashionable to know nothing, then who is contributing to the Wiki? 14 year-olds were invoked several times as something akin to the Red Menace.
Anyway, I am probably getting it wrong because his rant was so out there.
You really should listen to that interview -- it is unbelievably whack!
Oh and @20 posted by EH
Your comment warmed the cockles of my heart.
Oh, here's the interview:
http://radio.seti.org/past-shows.php
from 13:10-21:30
er... no.
last time I was unemployed all I *did* (becuase you can't look for a job 40hrs a week... at least I can't) was work on open source / free software.
As a developer my projects gave me some nice samples to use as a tool to get me a new job...
Those of us who have never wanted to create something and give it away for the joy of creating will just never understand open source. Sadly not having such an impulse seems to go hand-in-hand with thinking one is entitled to a thinly thought out opinion on *everything*
I've made dozens of comments on BoingBoing (and other blogs).... i'm still looking for my "back end" payment.
And yes, Cory, I'm looking at you. *wink*
Wow. What an economic dinosaur.
I can't shake this mental image of Keen as the Grinch, looking in befuddlement at all of the happy denizens of the internet and wondering how on earth anyone could enjoy stuff without getting paid for it.
I think free is great, but I also think free has its limitations. I can think of countless times that I would have paid someone $5 to $10 to help me with something that might have taken ten minutes to solve. But because so much of support is "free" on the web, quality is often sketchy, and you have to wait forever sometimes to get it. Because it is free, you are really not at liberty to complain either about quality. Free can have a very steep cost.
Nobody's getting that 'backend' (sounds painful though) money ? I do.
I've been passionate about a 3D authoring program called Blender since before a bunch of users bought it in 2002 and opened the sources. I've wrote documentation, tutorials, answered countless questions, adapted the program to my line of work, furniture making, scripted a bit even, all for the fun and good feeling of doing something right.
The program has greatly progressed and now is truly in the big leagues. As such it is adopted by more and more professionals who won't hesitate to pay 50$/hr+ for consulting fees if the help comes fast and is efficient.
Half of my income comes from there now.
Jean
Some people see a depression leading inevitably to Weimar Germany, the burning of the Riechstag, and the slide into barbarism. Some people see it leading to a New Deal, solidarity, and a generous and giving spirit that fills up the nation.
Sadly, BBC Radio 4's Iconoclast programme is going to be featuring this trolling next week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/iconoclasts/
BULLCOOKIES
I LOVE to make stuff and give it away on the internet, especially when it entertains and educates people. I PAY MONEY in hosting fees and software to do this. It takes effort and time and dedication, but it is all worth it when you get that sincere email from a stranger that says 'thank you so much for contributing.'
It's not about money. But people who's sole concern is money have trouble seeing that.
back end? what about the hundreds of thousands (more?) of people who make money support *nix products around the world?
or who just like to have the newest and coolest stuff, an OS that doesn't crash, music that noone else has because everyone else only listens to pop radio, the best recipes delivered straight from the cook's mouth and not committed to the printed page yet.
lots of egoboo to go around, and that word is now going to be part of my vocab, meaning egoboost.
Ugh, reminds me of my old boss.
We got talking about blogging once.
After I explained it to him, he just couldn't understand why I did it.
He kept asking me how I expect to make money off of it.
Then he said he thought it was silly, and couldn't do it unless he was paid to.
But blogging is a recreational activity, I earn cash from other sources, so I can blog.
It's really sad that there are some people who can only see value in terms of cash.
Maybe the best way to explain egoboo to the money-hungry without hobbies is thus:
Do you only have sex to procreate? No?
If they can't figure it out from that, they are probably hopeless.
Andrew Who?
Sounds just like Nazi Germany to me...
There, its been said - Godwin's rule is invoked - game over...
Right, Keen.
wow! This guy is really out of touch.
Excuse me for being logical but isn't Boing Boing more or less a blog site for financial return? I might be wrong. I only use a small percent of my brain. Ya'll are so idealistic that you can't see the yellow brick road on which you are walking.
"Apropos of nothing really, but Keen's picture makes me want to punch him in the face."
Well put. Did BoingBoing look for the most douchebaggy picture for this douchebag? Or is this his regular profile image! LOL!
People will contribute more when the economy tanks. After they haven't found a job after searching for a while, they will sit at their keyboard and screw off rather than look.
Biscuit4 @42: And your point is...?
I'm just wondering..why hasn't Mr. Keen sued Boing Boing for republishing some of his quotes and his image? He might become the first person who gets paid for trolling.
Ah, another chance to rub Keen's nose in it.
That's the wonderful Andrew Keen vs. Emily Bell (who tears his last book to pieces in front of him) article from the Guardian a year or two back.
Yah, and not just that. Hey, there will be a free talk at Harvard University Oct. 29, 2008, from 3-5p about iic computer standards. The talk will be given by a University of Berkley software developer who was an initiator of BSD, some version (3.5?). Place: 60 Oxford St, rm 311. RSVP at iic.harvard.edu. Might want to bring cigarettes. Light refreshments will be served
>r s ths hs rglr prfl mg!
mmm. t's jst hs fc... H ws n th Clbrt Rprt lst yr, nd sng t mvng s vn wrs, lt ln th crp tht cms flyng t f t.
Shorter Andrew Keen: The dot-com bubble will unpop itself. Any day now.
@48: Let's just stick to discussing Keen's ideas, not the way he looks, please.
NELSON.C My point is that this is a futile argument. You are not gonna stop blogging are you? Ten years from now you could have a crappy apartment in Santa Monica but you're still gonna blog for no reimbursement. It's like speaking dude. dude.LikeLike nobody on this great site (and I mean that I really dig this site) advertises their own shit. Please.
P.S. Some day Charelton Heston will find a half submerged statue of liberty and realize apes rule the future world.
A few things. First of all, if we're really headed for a depression, people aren't going to have to worry about spending all their time making money. One of the biggest problems with a depression is that there aren't enough jobs or income opportunities. So I would actually expect to see a lot more "gift labor" being done, since people have so much more free time than they're used to, and want to continue being productive even though nobody can/will pay them for it.
Also, gift labor is, for the most part, not an idealistic charitable endeavor. That is to say, people don't do it based on a philosophy that they have more time/money than they need and should share the wealth. If they did, then you could expect that sharing to diminish when people become poorer.
But actually, people do it because it's inherently fun and satisfying to create things and have others appreciate them, as was mentioned above. That's not something that's going to change based on economic status - at least until things get really bad. Admittedly if you can't pay your internet bill or keep your home, you'll have problems keeping up with your open source projects, but that's hardly news.
However, even if things got unstable enough to make it difficult to reliably participate in productive internet communities, I'd hope that the ex-members of these gift exchanges would find ways to project the same philosophy and systems on the communities they find themselves a part of. There are plenty of amazing ways that the concept of "gift labor" can be used in a depressed economy.
Also, perhaps an overlooked point is that people have always wanted to make money from their work, but don't always realize what does and does not constitute "work". When someone puts up pictures of their vacation or their new baby on Flickr, that's work.
It doesn't seem like work to the user, because they get some value out of it, namely getting to share pictures with their friends, but Flickr is also building a business out of those pictures. That person's contribution to Flickr is free labor which is making Flickr money, but who knew?
My point is that people do tend to be greedy, and if they really realized how much money institutions were making off activity they don't consider work, they'd want a cut. And hey, maybe some of them would like a cut now. But since the "means of production" (if you will) are controlled by centralized for-profit institutions, it's unlikely to happen.
There are already sites out there that pay you for your videos, that pay you for your blog posts, that charge less or nothing for your auction listing. But do people use them? They do not, because YouTube, Facebook, and eBay already control the infrastructure favored for those types of contribution.
The reason most people aren't getting paid for their "work" on web 2.0 isn't that they don't want money, it's that the value of their work is being intercepted by the "owners" of web 2.0.
@35 Cory:
didn't both things happen at the same time?
Yeah kinda like what happened 2001 ... not
We obviously are not building open source projects for profit or we would have charged in the first place.
I break with thee, I break with thee, now poop on your shoes
Zizak @53,
That is an excellent point. The monthly fee for cable and internet and phone is ridiculously high. I think AT&T and Time Warner and all these huge corporations that currently rake in all the cash should actually get a lot less money. The artists and production teams that create all the content should get alot more. I'll say it: Redistribute the Motherf*n Wealth.
As always, Keen fails to understand the gift culture that has found its best expression in the loose ties formed of the Internet. It's a culture that expresses itself in all aspects of human life but has become a global phenomenon when it's possible to make things happen on the other side of the world: Bruce Sterling wrote a great little short story about it called 'Maneki Neko'.
I'm reminded of the first piece of free software that I came across, probably 14 or 15 years ago, Stone Soup Group's Fractint. The group's motto was 'Don't want money, got money. Want kudos' (or something like that, I am old, and smell funny).
People will always do things because they can. I am involved with a subculture of musicians and artists who will never make a living from what they do, but do it because they want to and want other people to enjoy it to - the source of egoboo, if you want. It's no different on the Internet as it is in real life, and I'm sure Keen knows this, but he keeps on recycling his fallacies to get himself some more column inches. I suppose some people might call it a living.
Actually, as an open source developer, I get more offers for paying work than I can handle. And this really isn't my day job.
Some people want to get their hands dirty and change how things work. Other people want to pay someone else to do the work.
If you have a project and there's an open source framework that does 85% of your desired functionality as a starting point, it makes a lot of sense to pay someone to make it do what you want. You win, they win, we all win.
Now, I was working (and will continue to work) on the project regardless of the paying gigs it generates. It's a creative outlet. It's entertainment. And yeah, it's an "egoboo" [!?] ... I think. That's not contagious, is it?
Oh yeah. Keen always has his finger right on the pulse.
Sigh, I had plenty of *other* instructors that are much more deserving of blogosphere time.
Keen's problem is that he sees everyone with a good social idea as an unyielding opportunist. This is a common thread, from his sociology-class railing against Debs to his modern railing against Wales. He's a Hobbesian, but to the point that he actually seems to be *less* trusting of people the more benevolent their proposals.
Keen doesn't seem to believe in the notion of giving something to society to better society as a whole. If you give something to society, you've wasted it, because you've gotten nothing back. Ergo his equating crowdsourcing with "free labor". There's no such thing as a communal project; there is only direct ROI.
He misses out on the point of passion. There will always be free because people have a passion about doing 'xyz'. 'xyz' gives them fulfillment that a paid job does not. 'xyz' gives bragging rights, status, and more.
In hard economic times some websites might falter. But we have not seen the end of things done for free.
Christ on a crutch.
There are plenty of examples of this behavior in the off-line world, too. I know people who put incredible time and money into community theater, and when they charge for tickets, it's just to pay for the space and maybe the props. Zillions of people participate in music for the joy of it and the for the pleasure an audience.
And shit, this is even true about writing. How many zine publishers are out there doing it just for kicks? Why does writing pay so poorly, except for the ocean of people desperate to do it? How many people working on first novels ever realistically believe they will make a living from it?
You would think that if anybody in the world would understand the ego boost that comes from writing for the public, it would be the hugely self-inflated Andrew Keen.
the author doesn't understand the concept of opportunity cost. you may be reluctant to spend time for free if you could earn money with the same time. a recession is a period of systemic unemployment, not a period of occasional unemployment. i.e., if you're out of a job, you're going to have trouble finding one, and you will have more free time - if anything, unpaid contributions will INCREASE.
i've often argued that one major reason for the fact that germans write more free software code per capita than anyone else is that they have a very long student life, so the opportunity cost of time spent contributing for free is low.
You do demo work to get hired, and companies hire you because they need people to create new work like that for as long as they need it, because that company is in turn servicing clients who either need that software themselves or need done whatever that software enables people to actually do.
None of that requires rent-seeking extortion of copyright and patent.
p.s. As others have already said, Andrew Keen is a douchebag who refuses to believe in spontaneous order and individual self-motivation.
Sorry Cory, but in many ways Hitler's National Socialism and FDR's New Deal were very much the same. Goebbels even visited the United States and commended FDR that he was taking the correct course of action in the wake of the "failure of capitalism".Of course later they renounced each other. Same story with the Soviets. I read a book years ago, the title of which eludes me at the moment, that elaborated on how all of the horrors we associate with the Nazis and Soviets originated in ideologies originating in the United States but taken to a logical extreme elsewhere. As political conflicts arose between these states (USA, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia), it was mutually beneficial for the USA to deny/ignore being the origin of those ideas, while the Nazis and Soviets didn't dare admit that their ideologies were imported. Both sides found it convenient to hide this fact, as neither wanted to be associated with the other.
Stuff and nonsense. If you understand *community*, or you understand *social currency*, or you understand that "sharing" is not "communist", or you understand "for the pure joy", you understand why people do something for "nothing". Because everything is nothing, including your freaking 'revenue'.
And many people will have more time, not less.
FAIL
as Spider often repeats: happiness shared is increased, sorrow shared diminished
ANAGLYPH, short and sweet sarcasm. well put.
I never got around to telling Mark what a hoot it is to see him using fanspeak and quoting Eney out of the Fancyclopedia.
Old-line fannish fanzine fandom (Mike Gunderloy's initial milieu), which is arguably the Ur-many-to-many community, has always known better than Andrew Keen on this point. Fanac may not require underemployment, but it thrives on it.
He should change his last name to 'Dulle'.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2008/tc20081228_809309.htm