view point
if content’s free, i’m out of work By P.J. O’Rourke
The medium is the message. And the message is clear: I’m not getting paid. There have been attempts to erect paywalls around some of it — iTunes, The Wall Street Journal, naughty bits. But consult your 15-year-old son or daughter. Content is free. All news and information, all facts and understanding, all knowledge of good and evil are a few clicks away, gratis. The serpent is out of business in Eden. The forbidden fruit is on the house. No penalty is paid for taking a bite. Does this benefit mankind? It doesn’t benefit me. I was a writer for 40 years. Now I’m a content provider. And content is free. And I wonder — selfishly perhaps — to what degree free content is beneficial at all. You’ll notice how much smarter everyone’s gotten since WebCrawler was introduced in 1994. The economy is purring like a kitten. The debt ceiling debate in the U.S. Congress was over in minutes. The House of Representatives googled “spending.” The Senate googled “revenue.” Then President Obama went to Wikipedia and typed in the algorithm for “balanced budget.” The EU installed a Fiscal Discipline app on government computers in Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal. Everything is fine now in Europe. And Al Qaeda’s leadership realized that, with their capacity to raise money, cause panic and destroy assets, they should give up on terrorism and start a venture capital fund. I don’t entirely blame the Internet. Wide availability of free content in America dates back to public libraries and compulsory education. Both started in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is why it’s such a smart place. Representative Barney Frank, mobster Whitey Bulger and presidential candidate Mitt Romney are all from there. A grade-school dropout couldn’t foster a nationwide housing bubble the way Frank did as chairman of the house Financial Services Committee. The Boston Public Library probably has a whole section
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devoted to living on the lam for 16 years like Bulger. And 86.2 percent of the Massachusetts population is Internet-connected as well. It took Mitt Romney a lot of time playing Angry Birds to come up with what could be a foolproof plan to lose the Republican presidential nomination to a crazy Texan who just might be George W. Bush with Botox and a wig. In the 20th century, it was radio and television that supplied the free content. They also supplied an example of what happens to the quality of free content when its quantity increases. Originally, radio had a narrow transmission bandwidth. Now there’s a Sirius Satellite Radio station for knitting enthusiasts. Once television had three channels (not including educational TV, which was not included in anyone’s viewing). The number of channels today is higher than, judging by infomercials, viewers can count. In one lifetime we went from Alice and Trixie on “The Jackie Gleason Show” to “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” and from Orson Wells broadcasting “The War of the Worlds” to commentator Glenn Beck living it. With the Internet, it didn’t take that long. The Internet started out as a means for academics and the military to trade hints about solving Fermat’s Last Theorem and bombing Moscow, and it ended up on your Facebook page. Tasty recipe for potato salad. BTW, that dress makes your butt look big. Of course, none of this content, no matter how low we value it, is truly free. Be it an ancient Philco radio, a laptop, school taxes for a new gymnasium or a communication satellite, we always have to buy the box content comes in. The problem now is that the unattractive package we’re paying for is Mark Zuckerberg and Arianna Huffington. They and their ilk, an ilk pervading the Web, have developed a free content business model that’s all too appropriate to the Internet. In February 2011, when Arianna made her $315 million deal with AOL for The Huffington Post and Wall Street was claiming Facebook should be priced at $50 billion, David Carr, who covers media for The New York Times, noted: “Most of the value was created by people working for free.” People like me.
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