I'm just asking, can we afford to live in a world where ideas have no inherent value?

I'm not expecting that anytime soon the water at Niagara Falls is going to abandon its traditional habit of moving downward. I'm just wondering how obvious it is that the same natural laws apply to the downward spiral in the value of "content."

by Ken

Earlier this week I called attention to, and made some observations based on, what seems to me a direction-pointing essay-review by The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell, "Priced to Sell: Is free the future?" The Gladwell essay takes as its point of departure a new book by Wired editor Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, in which the author works from the premise: "Information wants to be free, in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill."

Anderson writes, "In the digital realm you can try to keep Free [oh yes, he insists on capitalizing "Free"] at bay, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win." And of course, practically speaking, what he's saying is grounded in reality. And there's no question that digital media have made it painfully easy to appropriate -- a fancy way of saying "steal" -- ideas. As Gladwell puts it: "The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things 'made of ideas.'"

What I find shocking is how little discussion there is of the proposition -- the reality, I guess Anderson would say -- that ideas no longer have any economic value, whether they're good or bad.

In another lifetime I could, I suppose, have considered myself a "professional writer." I never actually made my living as a writer, except perhaps for brief periods when that was more or less the only income I had, and I can assure you it didn't constitute a "living." Even in those periods, if I dig deep into memory, I would probably have to acknowledge that part of such income as I had came not from writing but from editing and proofreading.

There was at least the positive development that I learned this way that I was not cut out temperamentally to live the freelance lifestyle, especially in the absence of any instinct or aptitude for marketing my wares. Not with a landlord insisting that he must have a rent check each and every month, not to mention this unshakable habit I had developed of insisting on eating on a regular basis.

I can't say that my writing did much to make the world a better place, but in that other lifetime I did have the experience, by no means invariable for a writer, of writing stuff (a) that almost exclusively was stuff I wanted to write, and (b) that a certain number of readers recognized and appreciated as coming almost exclusively from my own perceptions and beliefs, such as they were.

Of course those accomplishments, minimal as they were, were made possible almsot entirely by the fact that I did not depend on the proceeds from that writing to provide food and clothing and shelter. It also mattered that I was only responsible for my own needs. Even at the time it occurred to me that I had no idea how I would have managed if I'd had family reponsibilities. (Eventually there were family responsibilities, for my aging mother, and what I did, from a financial standpoint, was to rack up a rest-of-lifetime's worth of debt. But that's another story.)

Fast-forwarding to this present lifetime, I do still write, but mostly this is what I write. Don't get me wrong. Beyond whatever satisfaction there is in getting something said more or less right, which happens once or twice a year, I feel privileged to have contact with DWT readers. That's where this actually gets to be fun sometimes.

I guess I'm past the ego thing of writing for no pay. It even has its compensations, like never having to worry about whether what you're writing is worth what you're being paid -- although this is of surprisingly little consolation when I'm struggling to make some point in minimally coherent form. And I can't say that it was often a realistic concern in my old writing-for-pay life, since it was usually my standards I was writing to, and they didn't often have much in common with those of my paymasters. (In addition, the pay was in general so meager that the buyers could hardly complain about not getting their money's worth.)

(There's another compensation: After a lifetime of living in terror of having writing errors slip through, I no longer have to worry. Oh, I do worry still, and I try to clean that stuff up, eventually, but you'd never imagine the agony it once caused me when as much as a typo appeared in print.)

At the same time, it's an odd perspective, looking out at a world in which more writing than ever is being done, some of it for pay and some of it not for pay. (This isn't quite as black-and-white as it sounds, because there are lots of people -- working in both the nominal "for pay" and "not for pay" realms -- who are paid so little that it hardly counts.) I'd like to think it's only natural, but maybe it's just my background, for an onlooker to wonder how easy it is to distinguish quality-wise between the paid-for and un-paid-for writing.

Obviously if you're reading this, you're a reader. And I wonder what you've observed. It seems to me pretty clear that an awful lot of paid-for writing is, um, not enduringly wonderful (which isn't exactly the same thing as saying "it's crap," but it certainly allows for that possibility), while an awful lot of stuff being churned out online for little or no pay -- of course we readers have no for-sure way of knowing which is which, and I suppose it's really none of our business -- not only is first-rate but makes potentially invaluable contributions to the future of our civilization.

I don't really have more to say at this point, except that I think this is a conversation that we've got to have, preferably before Chris Anderson's reality is set in stone (sorry, I can't think of any digital equivalent to use here, digital media being so alarmingly impermanent). It's not so much a personal consideration as a societal one. It just seems to me that the advancement of civilization has always depended on ideas, and I stubbornly resist the idea that we can live in a world where good ideas have no value. Of course you still have to figure out how to make money off them -- that's always been true -- but the notion that the ideas themselves have no value . . . well, that scares me.

What I find shocking is how little discussion there is of the proposition -- the reality, I guess Anderson would say -- that ideas no longer have any economic value, whether they're good or bad. Of course, assigning a dollar value to services performed has always been at best an inexact science, and in my next post, I'm going to be calling one of the clearest thinkers I'm aware of, the great E. B. White, to the witness stand with some thoughts on the point. (This will also be an opportunity to DWT business left unfinished owing to the mysterious disappearance of my old Perennial paperback copy of the White anthology The Second Tree from the Corner. I've got a newer and, believe it or not, much better copy now.)

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