Futurismic

The entry of former Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde into the micropayments scene with the beta-launch of his new Flattr service has people discussing donation-based funding models for creatives once again. Micropayments have been mooted plenty of times before now, but no one has ever made them work well enough to catch on – PayPal could have gone that way, for instance, but there wasn’t a big enough margin for them in those minuscule payments, so we’ll have to hope that Flattr (or something similar) can fill the gap at the nickels-and-dimes end of the market. Even if it never becomes a prime revenue stream for anyone, I’d like the ability to be able to donate money to my favourite bands in that sort of manner, for instance, without having to send it through the grasping hands of the record label middlemen.

But the need for new ways to support creative workers is becoming increasingly apparent – as is the set of jobs included under that catch-all, with Deanna Zandt suggesting that one way for journalism to survive is to start considering the journalist as another sort of artist, at least as far as looking for income streams is concerned [via Stowe Boyd]:

How can journalistic endeavors, desperately needed to maintain our terribly just and free society and all that, be supported? Since information/news is no longer a scarce commodity, it just doesn’t fit into a market-based model anymore, in my head. Advertising is only going to carry it so far, as we’re seeing. And besides, do we really want news to be only of commercial value? Do I only want to read news in places where advertisers want to see their ads?

[...]

If you’re a musician, for example, it’s easier than ever to get your work heard by more people than just your friends. But not paid for by a whole bunch, probably. That’s the sticker, eh? A few years ago, as Napster started ticking off the recording industry, someone said that it was clearer than ever what the musician’s job is: not to sell records, but to travel around and play for people. That’s what they’ve always done, and that’s what they’re returning to.

Journalism is grasping at straws for a new model to pay everyone’s salaries. The old model, though, was in many ways distorted, and probably distended. Maybe it’s not, however, that journalistic endeavors are going to be the new starving artists— maybe it’s that news producers and art makers need to get their heads together and figure out how we’re going to create not a model, but a whole new system that creates thrivable conditions for creators to get their jobs done.

Zandt is preaching what she practices here, having crowdsourced the advance for her imminent book on social networks (as discussed by Michelle Pauli of The Guardian):

Using the wisdom of the crowd to research a book is nothing new. Clay Shirky based a whole tome around the concept. But using the wealth of the crowd to fund your book? For no return? That’s a new one.

It’s the unusual approach taken by Deanna Zandt, an American “media technologist and consultant to key progressive media organisations”. Last summer she issued a plea on her blog for donations to support her while she spent three months writing a book about social networking as a tool for social change and action, looking specifically at communities she says have too often been marginalised as social networks have developed: “women, people of color, queer folk, and more”.

Zandt has a publisher for this book, Berret Koehler, but they do not provide authors with advances to write their books. For some (unexplained, especially as the book is due to be published in June 2010) reason the book is “incredibly fast-tracked” and so she needed
“to stop working as a consultant for the next three months and do nothing but write the book. Thus, I need investors. I need you to help me raise $15,000 to cover my expenses, travel, and research. Please toss some money into a ‘Feed Deanna’ pot!”

A lot of people have taken issue with Zandt’s approach, mostly focussing on the perceived lack of return that her crowdfunders receive for their donations; for my money, I think the problem is with Zandt’s particular implementation of the idea (which is easily read as saying “send me money and I might do some work”, though that’s a massive oversimplification) rather than the idea of crowdfunding itself (which offers a whole raft of implementations and models, many of which I expect haven’t even been thought of yet). For some people, perhaps just knowing they’ve supported the creation of something is enough; that’s how patronage of the arts used to work, I believe, though I have no idea how prevalent the “anonymous benefactor” used to be.

Pauli’s piece goes on to point to a post by Futurismic’s very own Tim Maly, which gathers up some of the discussion around the Zandt story before setting out his own opinion:

My feeling is if you find a way to get paid for your work full-time: TAKE IT, TAKE IT, TAKE IT.

[...]

Here’s the thing about money: it’s fungible. If I give you $25 and you buy a $25 steak, we can’t say for sure that I bought you a steak. The only thing we can say is that I gave you $25 more than you would have had otherwise. If you give me $200,000 to make a video game, all you can say for sure is that at the end of the day a game got made to your satisfaction (or not) and I got $200,000. Maybe the money came from you, maybe some of your money funded another project. Maybe money from another project funded yours. Maybe we took out a loan, hoping that future income would cover the costs of current work.

Here’s the thing about writing: when you are a writer, you become a studio of one. You have a monthly burn rate and some sort of source(s) of cashflow. For your work to be sustainable, cash-flow needs to meet or exceed your income. That’s it.

Another factor to consider with crowdfunding, especially for journalism, is that it can end up supporting work that wouldn’t be produced under the old “pitch it, sell it, write it, get paid” system. Case in point: Paige Williams’ article on legendary off-the-gridder Dolly Freed, which she pitched and pitched until she was blue in the face, before turning to what she calls “Radiohead journalism” (as a hat-tip to the experimental business model around the In Rainbows album of 2007*) as a way to get the money to cover the expense of writing the piece.

A common (and valid) counteragument against this sort of funding is that it currently has the fashionable appeal of novelty, plus the support of social media entrepreneurs who can afford to waft a few hundred bucks toward a project that chimes with their own philosophies of creative endeavour and visions of the future of business. I’ve got dozens of ideas for journalistic pieces sat in my notebooks and text files, but I doubt I’d have the same success as Williams – no one knows who I am, and my journalism is (being generous) raw and untrained. Crowdfunding looks plausible for those who already have their foot in the door, but how would a hypothetical wannabe reporter like myself nudge the door open far enough to achieve the same results?

Perhaps the answer is to start small, keep your goals realistically ambitious at first, build up your reputation and contacts and fanbase, get the snowball rolling. That’s how it’s always worked for non-mainstream bands, after all, and the other route for musicians – get “discovered”, get signed by a major, be groomed into megastardom – is looking more shaky and hollow by the week (thanks in no small part to Simon Cowell and their ilk, who may have managed to squeeze some last spurts out of cash from a dying business model, but have done so at the cost of finally exposing the mechanics of that business model for the manipulative sham it’s always been).

A small but die-hard clade of fans is enough to keep an artist in business nowadays (provided their tastes don’t run to Hollywood mansions and Gaultier bling, and assuming they’ve built up a strong level of engagement with said fanbase), so is it completely implausible that the same could work for writers, be they novelists or journalists? Indeed, it’s the rabid fandom of (often young, often female) early supporters that has traditionally catapulted musicians into the public awareness, and we shouldn’t discount the power of that sort of fandom in our networked world, be it for books (Twilight, anyone?), music or movie stars:

In an essay entitled “1,000 True Fans” Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, defines a true fan as “someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce.” Kelly’s theory is that all any artist needs to survive in the “long tail” environment of the web is a core of one thousand true fans who will spend one hundred dollars on the artist’s products each year. That’s about one concert ticket and a couple of CDs, which by my calculations would put a fangirl at least one notch above a “true fan” in the hierarchy of fanhood. And that is precisely why the earth shakes when girls decide that something is likable. Greater than just buying power, true fanhood is about participation, and the web presents a multitude of fangirl opportunities both to consume and produce idol information. Of course all this includes a willingness to follow a band, artist, or celebrity until they are no longer working in the industry – well, maybe even a little after that too.

Of course, writers aren’t usually very rock’n'roll (except the late and much-missed Doctor Thompson, perhaps); writer fandom is predominantly based around the writing rather than the writer, at least at first, and writing is (sadly) harder to market than a personality or a pretty face. But everyone has to start from zero at some point, and I’m confident that the market for good writing, fictional or otherwsie, isn’t going to go away – it’s going to migrate to new places and change its shape, but as a species we’re too obsessed with stories to let it wither and die off. And as a final positive note, research indicates that internet habitues are willing to pay for quality content online, albeit with a few important caveats:

The survey, which included more than 27,000 customers globally, found that consumers are (naturally) more inclined to keep already free things free. Still, things that people pay for offline—such as movies, music, and games—were the same things that people were most willing to pay for (or consider paying for) online.

[...]

This doesn’t mean the money will come without conditions, though; more than three-quarters of those surveyed said they expect online content to be free if they already subscribe to a newspaper or magazine offline, and 71 percent said that the online content would have to be be “considerably better” than what’s currently free before they’ll get out their wallets.

At least some users seem to be realistic about what to expect if they don’t pay for it: almost 4 in 10 (34 percent) said they thought the quality of online content would suffer if companies could not charge for it. (Another 36 percent had no opinion on the matter.) Forty-seven percent of respondents said they would accept more advertising in order to subsidize free content.

It’s a brave new world out there, and I suspect that even if crowdfunding doesn’t become the norm, it’ll still be an important part of the creative ecosystem in a decade’s time… and if you PayPal me some cash, I’ll start researching and writing a book about its progress right away.

[ * - Good grief, In Rainbows was released nearly two and a half years ago... where does the time go? ]

Sometimes I think I should have more faith in my own mad ideas. While the UK postal strikes were in full effect earlier in the year, I was kicking around an plan for replacing the increasingly beleaguered Royal Mail with a sort of peer-to-peer localised mail delivery system, which everyone I mentioned it to told me was completely impractical. [image by piermario]

I dare say they were probably right, but it’s still somehow gratifying to see that it’s not so crazy an idea that I’m the only person to have had it – via Global Guerrillas comes a post by a fellow called Chase Saunders in which he describes a similar idea: UsExpress.

I have mental picture of millions of people driving back and forth to work (and other places) over and over again.  It’s almost like Brownian motion.  Even if people rarely took long trips, there would be plenty of this routine, back and forth motion to ship all the packages we could possibly want, if only there were a service that gave a percentage of these drivers the right incentives, information, and infrastructure to hand off the packages at the proper moment. USExpress could be that service.

[...]

If my father took 10 packages, 4 days a week, fifty weeks a year, that would be 120 x 10 x 200 = 240,000 package miles.  How much do you think it costs to pay for a UPS driver to carry and deliver 240,000 package-miles?  Even if we assume an average of 300 packages on board at all times, that’s probably at least a week’s salary, not to mention overhead and benefits.  The difference is, the UPS guy is not going to drive that route unless we pay him (and train him, and buy him a truck, etc.)  But my father is going to drive to work anyway. If the pickup and dropoff locations are close enough to his work and home, why not generate a few hundred — or a few thousand — extra dollars a year?

Sure, there are some flaws to the idea, but Saunders addresses some of the big ones. The major stumbling block would be getting past the largely unfounded institutional trust we have in national mail systems – the trust that parcels won’t be lost, and that they will get to where they’re supposed to go, on neither of which Royal Mail has a flawless record. But such a system might just fill the gap as energy costs soar toward the day that physical delivery becomes obsolete…

I expect many of the writers in Futurismic’s readership are already using Twitter to communicate with colleagues and friends across the globe… but have you considered putting it to the more practical use of getting people to help you brainstorm your plot problems? PR maven Steve Rubel points to a friend of his, Jeff Kirvin, who has done exactly that.

Personally, I think I’d struggle to ask the hive-mind a question that specific about something I was writing; outsourcing some of the imaginative process would probably derail the pleasure and focus of creation for me, I think. Do you lot ask for help on sticky plots, or do you conquer the mountain alone?

And speaking of help with plot points, I got an email from one Helen Callaghan informing me that she’s hosting a guest blogger whom you might want to ask questions of:

Marcus Chown, popular science author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin [and cosmology consultant to New Scientist - Ed.] will be guest blogging on my site!

He’s agreed to answer science questions from SF writers, so the idea is, if you’ve got a plot issue or setpiece that’s bugging you, or you ever wondered what would happen if a certain scenario came true, here’s your chance to get an expert opinion.

The idea is that we can start asking questions now by posting them in the comments on the site, and the answers will be posted on the 11th.

Thanks, Helen; that gives you a few days, so pop over and leave your questions if you got ‘em.

Despite continued growth as one of the most-visited sites on the web, Wikipedia has a problem – it’s losing editors faster than it’s gaining new ones. Cue lots of veiled “told you so” from the Wall Street Journal [via /message]:

… as it matures, Wikipedia, one of the world’s largest crowdsourcing initiatives, is becoming less freewheeling and more like the organizations it set out to replace. Today, its rules are spelled out across hundreds of Web pages. Increasingly, newcomers who try to edit are informed that they have unwittingly broken a rule — and find their edits deleted, according to a study by researchers at Xerox Corp.

“People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen,” says Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia and other large online community projects. “Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It’s too many cooks in the kitchen.”

What isn’t clear, at least from this article, is which editors are leaving. A few years ago, all you could find were articles complaining that Wikipedia had too many unskilled and uninformed editors, and that it was hence a valueless project; now that people are being deterred from fiddling because the cost of entry is too high for casual contributions, that’s the problem. C’mon, people; you can’t have it both ways.

Rather than unseating my faith in crowdsourcing, these developments at Wikipedia are pretty much in line with what I had expected to happen. The initial landslide of popularity was like a new frontier, and it inevitably attracted a lot of chancers and grifters – not least, I suspect, because the SEO Google-juice from outbound Wikipedia links is powerful stuff indeed. I’m inclined to see Wikipedia (and a lot of other web-based projects) as an emergent system, and this shedding of casual contributors makes perfect sense; not everyone cares enough to do it properly, and the system self-adjusts to exclude those low-value contributions. [image by mmetchley]

That said, Wikipedia isn’t completely emergent and spontaneous; the Wikimedia Foundation steers and directs it as it sees fit. But even so, it’s still surprisingly reliable by comparison to classically-produced encyclopedias… and those who accuse it of inherent bias have obviously never seen Conservapedia (which I’m not going to do the favour of linking to – just Google it if you fancy horrifying yourself with some ultra-conservative historical revisionism). Sure, it’s not perfect… but what is? I’d be interested to see a catalogue of the errors that a paper like the Wall Street Journal makes in the course of a year for comparison…

That said, there’s one statistic about Wikipedia that is fairly disappointing (though far from surprising):

A survey the foundation conducted last year determined that the average age of an editor is 26.8 years, and that 87% of them are men.

Um. Not so much a greying, after all.

Is there anything that can’t be crowdsourced? Google sure don’t think so, as they’ve just announced another new project for Joe Public to muck in on. Google Building Maker will be used to populate Google Earth with 3D models of major buildings:

We like to think of Building Maker as a cross between Google Maps and a gigantic bin of building blocks. Basically, you pick a building and construct a model of it using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes – both of which we provide. When you’re done, we take a look at your model. If it looks right, and if a better model doesn’t already exist, we add it to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. You can make a whole building in a few minutes.

It’s entirely browser-based, too, so no compatibility problems. Of course, you don’t get the freedom of Second Life, where you can build any damned building you feel like… but then learning how to build well in SL can take weeks of practice, whereas Google have aimed to make it as easy as possible. Which is a sensible move if you want people to do work for free, I guess… [image by Visentico/Sento]