SILICON VALLEY’S ASSAULT on journalism is a piece of a larger program. The technology companies want to overturn an entrenched idea at the heart of Western civilization. For three hundred years, our culture has venerated genius—it has made a fetish of originality and intellectual novelty. This can be a bit of an overwrought fixation. To state the banal, we know that there’s no such thing as a wholly original idea. The intellectual life is never quite as solitary as it seems. But there were excellent reasons for buying into the cult of genius. We consider humanity capable of moral progress. Forward motion requires a constant infusion of new ideas, whose production we must lavishly credit to incentivize. We consider conformism to be spiritually and morally deadening, so we celebrate its opposite. Genius and originality were two of the most revelatory and lasting ideas to emerge from the intellectual revolutions of the eighteenth century.
Silicon Valley has an entirely different view of human creativity. It believes in the virtues of collaboration, that groups working harmoniously yield better ideas than the isolated individual. It considers originality to be a highly overrated ideal, even a pernicious one. By emphasizing genius, we allow a small cadre of professional writers to act as if they monopolize wisdom or possess some superhuman capabilities. The aura of genius surrounding the accomplished writer creates the impression that the masses have relatively little creative potential, which has justified force-feeding them the creative output of that small priesthood of geniuses.
If Silicon Valley were merely lampooning our old fetish for genius, that would be harmless, maybe even salutary. But its goals are far more revolutionary than that. It has set out to dismantle the structures that have protected our ideas of authorship. Silicon Valley has waged war on professional writers, attempting to weaken the copyright laws that make it possible for authors to make a living from their pen. It has pursued a business plan that radically deflates the value of knowledge, which renders writing a cheap, disposable commodity. To pull off this strategy, it has attempted to puncture the prestige of the professional author. This war is another instance of Silicon Valley’s fake populism. Fittingly, its primary theorist is a Harvard law professor.
• • •
LONG BEFORE TED TALKS, there was Larry Lessig. His lectures and speeches were gripping spectacles of intellect, punctuated by multimedia. They became the stuff of legend. To this day, an official Microsoft tutorial provides lessons in how to give a “Lessig-style” talk. More than any other academic of his generation, Lessig has a feel for the zeitgeist. Before his fellow law professors had ever heard of the Internet, he made it his specialty. That doesn’t quite give him enough credit: Lessig did more than study the Internet, he defended it against existential threats. One magazine profile described him as “a kind of Internet messiah.”
What made this intellectual entrepreneurship so impressive was the seemingly narrow patch of academia from which Lessig launched himself. His nominal subject was the jurisprudence of copyright. But at an early date, he witnessed the entertainment industries’ oppressive effort to criminalize the downloading of music, its campaign to cuff kids for the relatively innocent offense of file sharing. He thundered against these efforts with a passion that attracted hordes of followers.
While Lessig wrote about the niceties of the law, his real argument was about culture. Despite his elite pedigree—Oxbridge degree, Supreme Court clerkship—he formulated a case that was radical, borderline utopian. He wrote with wonderstruck lyricism. The Internet would change the means of cultural production, he argued. In the twentieth century, culture had been ripped from the people. It had been placed under the rule of avaricious corporations, which pumped out profitable dreck. The masses were reduced to mere consumers, passive couch-bound recipients of movies, television, and music produced in Los Angeles and New York. “Never before in the history of human culture had [creative culture] been as professionalized, never before as concentrated. Never before has the creativity of the millions been as effectively displaced.” The Internet represented an opportunity to transcend that model, or rather, it could revive a very old one.
His argument went something like this: Once upon a time, people were active collaborators in the creation of culture. That was the essence of folk traditions. People took songs, tweaked them, and remade them as their own; they retold stories, adding their own embellishments. Higher forms of culture worked this way, too. What was Mark Twain but a skilled refashioner of the African American tales he overheard as a youth? If critics were honest, they would concede that every artist operated like this—borrowing, quoting, building supposedly original creations on the works of others. Jazz, at its core, entails the constant reinterpretation of the old songbook; hip-hop unapologetically swipes its beats and hooks. The great poets did this, too. T. S. Eliot, who stitched elusive and allusive quotations into his verse, issued the dictum “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
Lessig gave Eliot’s sentiment a cyber-age gloss. He described the difference between Hollywood’s oppressive brand of “read-only culture” and the Internet’s participatory “read-write culture.” At the dawn of the Internet, these two cultures were engaged in nothing less than a civilizational war. The conglomerates, fearful of the threat the “read-write” culture posed to their businesses, wildly accused innocent civilians and idealistic tech companies of violating copyright laws. It was crucially important to thwart this campaign, Lessig wrote. “If communism vs. capitalism was the struggle of the twentieth century, then control vs. freedom will be the debate of the twenty-first century.”
These arguments flew in the face of the culture’s ingrained ideas of authorship. These ideas were embodied in the copyright laws that he wanted to dilute—and in the romantic ideas about writing that had been taught to schoolchildren over the centuries. The old ideas of authorship emphasized the import of originality. Western culture made plagiarism a punishable taboo; it frowned on derivative thinking as lazy.
The challenge to this antique idea of authorship didn’t just emerge from Lessig. Indeed, some of the organizations that Lessig created to advance his arguments received checks from Google, which had its own reasons for promoting a critique of copyright. Most of Silicon Valley, however, agreed. During the early years of the Internet, theorists of technology aggressively celebrated amateurism. Elites had a chokehold on the country that prevented the masses from expressing their creativity. Clay Shirky described the pent-up genius as “cognitive surplus.” The Internet helped unleash this surplus—it allowed bloggers to express the truths that careerist pundits dared not speak; citizen journalists scored new scoops; Wikipedia soon trumped Britannica with its depth and range. The amateurs could produce such brilliance because of the purity of their passion. As Shirky wrote: “Amateurs are sometimes separated from professionals by skill, but always by motivation; the term itself derives from the Latin amare—‘to love.’ The essence of amateurism is intrinsic motivation: to be an amateur is to do something for the love of it.”
Our old idea of authorship romanticized the individual genius. It celebrated solitary toil at the desk as the highest form of creation. Silicon Valley championed a different theory of creativity. It emphasized the virtues of collaboration. Reid Hoffman, a cofounder of LinkedIn, enthused: “No one can succeed by themselves. . . . The only way you can achieve something magnificent is by working with other people.” This could be seen in any number of Silicon Valley’s favored terms: “peer production,” “social media,” “distributed knowledge.” Wisdom could be found in the amassing of massive data sets, in analyzing the motion of markets. That is the essence of Google’s ranking of Web sites, Amazon’s recommendation algorithms, and Facebook’s News Feed—all extrapolated from the accumulated wisdom of crowds.
There’s a screaming irony to this view of creativity. It flies in the face of Silicon Valley’s own creation myth. According to the story told about technology, and that technologists tell about themselves, creativity comes in the form of the fearless entrepreneur, the alienated geek working in the garage. This can sound a lot like Ayn Rand’s view of heroic individuality, and may account for why so many technologists gravitate toward libertarianism. Rand’s version of libertarianism also celebrates egotism. And there’s something more than a bit egotistical in this view of culture. The titans of technology may be capable of breathtaking originality and solitary genius, but the rest of the world is not.
• • •
SILICON VALLEY’S VIEW OF CREATIVITY is medieval. Europe, in the era before the Enlightenment, didn’t think much of authors. It also belittled originality, although for reasons that bear little resemblance to Lessig’s case. All credit for creativity was due to the divine source of inspiration: “God alone creates,” Thomas Aquinas asserted. Humans could produce only flawed imitations of the divine original.
Writers were dependent, fairly helpless creatures. They counted on the beneficence of royal and aristocratic patrons to finance the production of their work and to provide them with sustenance. Once a writer sold a manuscript, he surrendered control over it. It might be rewritten, lengthened, or mauled to pieces by a scribe or a printer. The writer had no choice but to submit to the butchering.
How little was originality valued? We now regard plagiarism as a grave intellectual sin, but the filching of words and plot ran rampant. Indeed, it was considered a primary tool of the craft. A good percentage of the body of work called Chaucer consists of translation and paraphrase. Shakespeare, for one, was a brilliant poet and an accomplished borrower. He lifted from Arthur Brooke’s The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet and Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony. “I am ‘sort of’ haunted by the conviction,” Henry James wrote, “that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.” But if he was a plagiarist—and that’s far too strong and unfair a term—it would have been impossible to level the charge against him. The word hadn’t yet been coined.
As in Larry Lessig’s utopia, culture was a collective effort; creation was guided by tradition. Cutting and pasting may have required a bit more effort than a click of a mouse, but it prevailed as a widespread method of creativity. We can be grateful that this mode of production yielded enduring monuments of culture, but it would be foolish to celebrate it as an ideal. There was a deep conservatism to the method. M. H. Abrams, the great cultural critic and literary historian, used the metaphor of the mirror to describe the mode. Writing wasn’t meant to change the world; it aspired to reflect and mimic it. Copying was the natural ideal for a society that depended on obedience to crown and church, that stridently resisted change.
Technology, in the form of the printing press, helped shatter the mirror. The new machinery of type arrived with capitalism and the Enlightenment. That is, the printing press created the potential for mass production of the written word; capitalism created the potential for a mass market for the written word; and the Enlightenment created the political and intellectual space for writing to flourish. Scribes and copyists were suddenly vestigial figures; writers acquired a heroic cast. In part, this was the doing of book publishers. To stand out in a crowded market, you need to differentiate and hype your product. A book is more salable if it reflects the mind of a genius.
Writers—those formerly anonymous craftsmen, those cobblers of words—were suddenly pedestal-worthy. The crucial mythmaking figure was William Wordsworth. He was paid terribly for his work. With Samuel Coleridge, he split thirty pounds from the sale of their Lyrical Ballads (1798). This was hardly a fee fit for a genius—and that’s what he considered the definition of true artistry. Wordsworth’s aspirations were far grander than mirroring reality. In Wordsworth’s view, a writer who merely recorded or re-created was a failure. Or in M. H. Abrams’s formulation, writers were meant to be a lamp, incandescently projecting original insights into the world. Wordsworth wrote, “Of genius the only proof is, the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before. . . . Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe.”
Genius could flourish only with proper compensation—and that compensation would make sense only if the law protected the artist’s work from pirates. (Because poets were rarely appreciated in their own time, copyright protections needed to be lengthy—so that there was enough time for the public’s taste to catch up with genius.) Wordsworth spent decades lobbying for a substantial extension of copyright, created one hundred years earlier in the Statute of Anne. “Deny it to him, and you unfeelingly leave a weight upon his spirits, which must deaden his exertions; or you force him to turn his facilities . . . to inferior employments.”
Wordsworth’s case for copyright may very well have been self-interested and self-aggrandizing. But that’s not very surprising. Originality demands arrogance. It’s the hubristic faith that there are new ideas to be hatched, new forms to be invented. We need to accord originality higher status because the culture would gravitate toward banality and cliché if we didn’t. Creating a new idea is risky because new ideas so often fall flat. The culture will always tend to repeat itself, to follow well-established formulas, because the safest way to make money and win popularity is to repeat the things that have worked before. Genius may be a bit of a sham, but it’s a culturally important sham. To put it in terms that Silicon Valley might understand, we need to perpetuate the idea of genius because the idea breeds innovation. Of course, Silicon Valley could never accept such an analysis, because it would diminish its profits.
• • •
ROMANTICS IN GERMANY AND ENGLAND wrote about genius with the same rhetorical force as Wordsworth. So did the American Founding Fathers. But the Founders were imperfect protectors of authorship. They wrote copyright into the Constitution, but also left a yawning loophole. American law said nothing about the rights extended to foreign works. Bootleg copies of British books came to inundate the American market. The pirated editions were dirt cheap. A reader in London would have spent about $2.50 for a copy of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. On the other side of the Atlantic, the same volume sold for six cents. When books failed to sell in England, publishers shipped them to the giant remainder table that was the United States. It was a glut accentuated by the fierce competition among American printers. By 1830, ten houses in Philadelphia alone were churning out copies of Sir Walter Scott’s work. As the publisher Henry Holt boasted, “[the] business lived to a large extent on what was morally, if not legally, thievery.”
English authors would shake with rage at this condition. When Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1842, he spent his tour railing against American publishing. “I am the greatest loser by the existing Law, alive,” he wailed. Rudyard Kipling, another big-time loser under the regime, placed a special order to a printer so that his complaints to an American publisher appeared on toilet paper: “Because you print the stolen property aforesaid very vilely and uncleanly, you shall be cursed from Alaska to Florida and back again.”
This created a maddening paradox. Americans were highly literate, but American literature was highly peripheral. The canonical writers of the nineteenth century—who, sadly, never had the reputations they deserved in their lifetimes—depended on jobs in the customhouse, consulates, or other outposts of the civil service. (Political parties also provided steady gigs to scribes willing to pump out propaganda.) The great printers of the early Republic rarely put their muscle behind books. Despite the riches Ben Franklin reaped from his Almanack, he hardly printed any other volumes. When Walt Whitman wanted to publish Leaves of Grass, he was forced to assume the costs of printing himself.
Writing wasn’t a profession. It was idealized as a hobby for patrician Men of Letters—who wanted to share their lifetime of erudition with the world and who considered compensation for their learned words to be vulgar. Henry Holt chided those who sought to dirty their noble words with talk of money. “Few men have ever [depended on their pen for income] happily. . . . Most good authors, from Shakespeare down, have had other resources. There are some pursuits in which it is almost as dangerous to make money the main end.”
Mark Twain saw through this hokum. He became a leading champion of tightening the screws on American copyright. When he pressed the case, he unknowingly nodded to Kipling’s protests. “This country is being flooded with the best of English literature at prices which make a package of water closet paper seem an ‘edition de luxe’ in comparison.” Publishers came to see the wisdom in his critique. Or more to the point, they were caught in a very ungentlemanly price war. Upstart firms flooded the market with cut-rate editions. After so many decades of seeing copyright legislation as inimical, publishers came to view it as a raft that would carry them back to the shores of profitability. In 1891, Congress heeded the plans of publishers and extended copyright to foreign works.
The law set in place a new economics, which transformed American writing from hobby to profession. This is the structure that the tech companies want to overturn. It’s easy to get carried along by Facebook’s arguments about sharing—and it’s also easy to work up a lather over the media conglomerates that profit from ludicrous extensions of copyright laws. But it’s important to remember how professionalization remade American letters: It democratized it. Writing became more diverse, more vibrant. This is counterintuitive. Professions are exclusionary; not everyone can earn a living from the pen. But the advent of book advances, magazine jobs, and hefty fees for writing assignments made writing a viable path for a far vaster population, who couldn’t find the hours for such a consuming pastime. Almost immediately after Twain’s triumph, writing was liberated from the privileged grasp of Brahmins.
For the first time in the history of the Republic, American literature came to dominate American tastes. A new generation of writers soon emerged, which better reflected the country, though very far from perfectly. It wasn’t concentrated in any region or any caste. Jack London and Upton Sinclair came from poverty. The hinterlands beyond New England and New York supplied writers like William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Ezra Pound, and Twain himself.
The sociology of American letters quickly changed because the economics did. Publishing became a big business. Writers produced the essential commodity, and their status and compensation came to reflect that fact. Magazines and newspapers had long neglected to credit the authors of pieces with a byline—that’s how low they considered the scribes who supplied them with words. In these years, writers increasingly saw their names floating above their pieces, though the New York Times resisted that practice until the 1920s.
The sums that publishing conglomerates paid writers were suddenly quite impressive. William Dean Howells called himself a “theoretical socialist, and a practical aristocrat,” though he confided to his father, “It is a comfort to be right theoretically and to be ashamed of one’s self practically.” (When calculated into present-day dollars, Howells took home $1,450,000 each year.) Or as Henry Holt sneered, “the golden goose was found for the author.”
Bohemia may have been the romantic ideal—the movie set for the modern writer. But professionalism was the ethos. No matter the quantities of booze poured down the authorial gullet, the Protestant spirit of work prevailed. As with Taylorism in the factories, writers imposed quotas on themselves. Graham Greene raced to reach his five-hundred-word ceiling each morning. Ernest Hemingway squeezed the same from his drenched melon. Work, Hemingway declared, was “the one thing that always made you feel good.” And despite his best efforts to squander his earnings, he left an estate worth $1.4 million. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who described himself as a “professional” with a “protective hardness,” tracked his earnings in a ledger with an accountant’s fastidious notations, even noting the $0.34 he received in 1929 for the English royalties of The Great Gatsby. (Gatsby, for the record, earned $8,397 in total royalties, and $18,910 when Fitzgerald peddled the movie rights.)
These quotidian details matter. Our great writers cared about money because they needed it. They needed it to feed their families, and so that they could devote themselves to fulfilling their creative selves. Without pay, they would have been consigned to day jobs, unable to fully apply themselves to their prose. Apologists for Amazon like to sneer at the writerly caste, a hermetic club that dismisses outsiders who aren’t part of the gang. Yet history shows the alternative to professionalized writing. A few geniuses from the lower rungs of the class structure would manage to produce lasting art, despite the distant odds. But writing would largely survive as a luxury for those who could afford it, a hobby for the wealthy—for the trust fund babies, the men of leisure, those with the resources to follow their economically irrational passions.
• • •
YEARS AGO, I was working in the Houghton Library at Harvard, the hushed home to the magnificent contrails of American letters, the papers of Dickinson and Emerson and Theodore Roosevelt. My work done for the day, I had a few hours to spare and asked the librarians if I could have a look at the papers of the New Republic, which had been trucked to Cambridge over the decades. The collection hadn’t been cataloged or sorted or even handled by an archivist. When it arrived at my table, it came in the form of old steel filing cabinets, wheeled by dollies. These towers soon crowded me, as if I were sitting in the middle of a museum version of the old office.
I began pulling drawers and disgorging files at random. As I settled the folders on the table, nervous about what my stubby fingers might inflict, I felt the fetishistic thrill of physically communing with greatness. Each page I turned over revealed the signature of canonical hands—air mail and postcards from Elizabeth Bishop, John Updike, Ralph Ellison, and Irving Howe. However glamorous the names of the correspondents, the content of the missives was strangely familiar to me. It precisely anticipated the email I received from writers. The files were filled with the eternal gripes: Why hadn’t the check for the last piece arrived? Could the editor do any better with the fee? The letters were sometimes aggrieved, sometimes abject, rarely charming.
Staring at these artifacts, I thought of a passage in Alfred Kazin’s memoir, Starting Out in the Thirties. As a young critic, Kazin would stop by the Chelsea offices of the New Republic’s literary editor, Malcolm Cowley. It was the bottom of the Depression. Writers queued for Cowley’s attention. “There were just too many of us wedged onto the single bench in the waiting room downstairs,” Kazin wrote. “Desperate cases haunting him for review[s].” The editor had a reputation for generosity with his assignments—which were like canned food from the church pantry that allowed writers to persist while their neighbors were famished.
That anecdote always seemed to me a reflection of that dark moment. But reading through the papers, I came to see that the sum Cowley paid was the disturbing revelation: $150 for a review. When I saw this figure in a letter, it gave me a stir. It was precisely the same amount the New Republic still paid for reviews of approximately the same length that we published on our Web site. I stared at the page. Eighty years of inflation . . . and stagnation. Writers are still paid precisely the same sum they received at the lowest moment in the economic history of the modern world.
Over my time as a journalist, I’ve seen the proprietors of journalistic outfits come to the conclusion that writers don’t really need to get paid very much. My career began at Slate, one of the first of the magazines created to live exclusively on the Internet. In those golden years, back in the midnineties, we paid one thousand dollars for each book review, and a few of our stars made even more than that. Today, Slate pays about three hundred dollars for a review.
We don’t need to rely on anecdote. There are studies to be examined. In 1981, the Authors Guild surveyed its members. It found that full-time writers made a median income of about $11,000 per year—if we adjusted that sum for inflation, it would now be about $35,000. That doesn’t sound like much at all, until we compare it with the Authors Guild’s 2009 findings, which uncovered a median income of $25,000. Sadly, the number rolls further down the deflationary spiral. In 2015, the median income dropped to $17,500. Over thirty-four years, writers took a 50 percent pay cut. The present salary lurks not much higher than the government’s official poverty line. Writing, a profession that once seemed fairly central to the project of Western civilization, is barely above water. The value of knowledge has been deflated and depressed, just as the tech companies intended.
• • •
EVERY MONTH, AS EDITOR, I would receive a report from our chief operating officer. In the parlance of modern business, it was a dashboard—a set of numbers and charts to keep tabs on the state of things. More precisely, the numbers tracked the productivity of my writers. The business gurus wanted me to think more rigorously and economically about our staff, to see precisely how many pieces they produced, the traffic garnered by those pieces, how writers performed on Facebook. Stated plainly on the dashboard: the salary and benefits paid to each writer, also the revenue that their articles generated for the business. (There was only one writer on staff who actually justified her salary, and it was because we paid her such a paltry sum.) They hoped that these numbers would guide me to increase the staff’s productivity—to snap the whip a bit harder, to consider an axe blow to the traffic runts, to assign more clickable pieces.
I kept these dashboards under lock and key for fear of demoralizing the rest of the staff. They had already demoralized me. We had the best art critic in the world, a true shaper of taste, and the metrics showed only how few readers clicked on his pieces. Chris Hughes urged firing him, and goaded me to miraculously find a better return on our investment in his work. But there was no way to make him meaningfully more lucrative or quantifiably more “productive” without destroying his dedication to his craft, without gutting all the things that made him so great.
The problem was framed all wrong. If I had known better, I would have handed Chris a copy of an old book by the economists William Baumol and William Bowen called Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma. The pair were interested in the economics of classical music. Turns out, a work like Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4 is a stubborn thing. When the piece debuted in Vienna, it took a full complement of musicians—two violins, one cello, and one viola. Two hundred years later, the performance of the piece hasn’t changed a lick. It takes the same number of musicians, playing instruments that have hardly changed. As it did in 1801, the piece takes just about twenty-four minutes to complete. Classical music has, in other words, slapped classical economics in the face. Over the centuries, it hasn’t become any more productive—and it can’t.
The problem that Baumol and Bowen identified was subtler than that: They named a condition called “cost disease.” While classical music hasn’t grown any more productive, the cost of producing it keeps increasing. A symphony orchestra requires trained professionals. And if it hopes to recruit these professionals, it needs to pay them a salary that roughly competes with the rest of the economy, which grows progressively more expensive. (A passionate oboist will take a pay hit to pursue a love of music, but still needs enough to afford food, child care, and housing.) Without plausible pay, these musicians will choose some other, more viable line of work.
Classical music has been in a state of terminal decline for decades. Cost disease is at the heart of this decay. It’s the reason that a concert ticket feels like a major philanthropic commitment—and why the middle class can’t afford an active interest in the genre. It’s the reason that arts organizations are perpetually sitting on the edge of financial collapse.
Writing is a bit different from classical music. For starters, it involves the creation of new work, not just the repetition and reinterpretation of a repertoire. There are always fresh goods to take to market. Growth is, therefore, not a quixotic quest. Besides, publishing seems to always find ways to grab a little productivity here and there. It can move printing presses to Asia; it can use technology to speed the process of assembling a book; it can sell e-books that cull the cost of cloth, paper, and distibution; its firms will merge to reduce back-office costs.
Yet there’s really no shortening the time it takes to write a book or a magazine article of substance—and there’s nothing that can be done to change that without changing the fundamental nature of the enterprise. No penny-pinching technology can remove the human from the fundamental process of creation, no piece of software can speed the production of thought, even as the cost of producing books gallops ahead with the rest of the economy.
For many centuries, publishers lived in denial of cost disease. In fact, they spent large parts of their day in denial of the fact that they worked for fully capitalist enterprises. Over time, they rationalized their firms—they attempted to master the sciences of marketing and supply-chain management. Yet there was a fundamental mystery at the heart of book publishing. It was impossible to know the worth of a book before its publication, no way to predict its value with any precision. Each book is its own entity, its own fickle market. What’s more, the denizens of publishing houses didn’t necessarily approach their jobs with a mercantilist mind-set. The editors who presided over publishing considered themselves tastemakers, artists in their own right. Jason Epstein, one of the great editors of the last century, wrote, “Trade book publishing is by nature a cottage industry, decentralized, improvisational, personal; best performed by small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy, sensitive to the needs of writers and to the diverse interests of readers. If money were their primary goal, these people would probably have chosen other careers.” Really, they were heirs to the old feudal tradition of patronage. That tradition never quite disappeared, and publishers felt obligations to the culture and to posterity. Somehow, they created a business that worked in spite of itself. They managed to produce enough hits to sustain the publication of works with negligible profits.
Amazon, however, has tattered that view of authorship. With its market share, publishers are utterly dependent on the Bezos behemoth to sell their product. This gives Amazon the power to squeeze and further squeeze its suppliers, to dictate terms to publishers. Its contracts with publishers extract capricious fees and far larger chunks of profit than a more competitive marketplace would demand. Publishers have acquiesced to Amazon at times, and violently resisted at others. Yet there’s no real recourse. When Amazon tightens its chokehold around publishers, it is authors who suffer. The houses shrink the number of titles they publish; they carve the advances they pay to authors into smaller chunks, doled out over larger spans of time. We can hardly ascribe the collapse in author pay to Amazon alone, but it has become a primary driver of the deflation of writing. Facebook and Google have found an even more effective cure for writing’s cost disease. They never, ever, under any circumstances, pay for it.
• • •
WRITING AS A PROFESSION is slowly decaying. We’ve been led by the hand to the brink by wild-eyed enthusiasts, like Chris Anderson, one of the Valley’s most esteemed thinkers:
In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won’t be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby. There is no law that says that industries have to remain at any given size. Once there were blacksmiths and there were steel workers, but things change. The question is not should journalists have jobs. The question is can people get the information they want, the way they want it? The marketplace will sort this out. If we continue to add value to the Internet we’ll find a way to make money. But not everything we do has to make money.
History has supplied some pretty definitive examples that undermine Anderson’s euphoric theory. During the first decade of this century, blogging flowered. Amateurs wrote with joy and what seemed like boundless energy. Many pundits were overawed by this effusion, and they came to view the whole caste of professional writers as superfluous, inferior even. Ten years later, those predictions about the triumph of the bloggers look fairly delusional. The army of amateur bloggers had moments of brilliance, but it wasn’t sustainable brilliance. Their ranks have diminished; the blogging moment has largely passed.
Over the centuries, writing became a profession, because it demands the discipline of a professional. There are only so many hours in the day for amateur pursuits—and very few writers are as gifted as Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot or Sylvia Plath, able to generate something lasting from stolen moments. Writing requires revision, fruitless hours of staring at screens, painstaking research. The flawed assumption in Anderson’s prediction was that the joyous production of knowledge was enough to fuel writers through a lifetime of tough moments. Like everyone else, writers dedicate themselves to their job for a variety of reasons, but those reasons include paying the bills.
When writing was professionalized in the late nineteenth century, the culture deepened. Writers began producing investigative journalism, novels of ideas, reported magazine features—complex, labor-intensive genres that require full mental devotion, the sort of devotion that we associate with a job. With professionalism, writers began to develop expertise. They operated under codes of conduct that held their work to a high standard of ethics. They began to take intellectual risks, because their profession rewarded risks—with more lucrative jobs and Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards.
But let’s not dwell in the irretrievable past, Silicon Valley instructs. Romantic authorship is dead and a glorious future awaits. Kevin Kelly has seen it. From his perch at Wired magazine, which he cofounded, he has produced an imposing oeuvre of futurism. With his gray Amish beard, Kelly has a prophetic visage and a prose style to match, passionately intense and full of grandiose pronouncements. He writes lines of homily, which end in rousing perorations: “Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.”
When Google began scanning every book on the planet, Kelly wrote one of the signature essays of the age, published by the New York Times Magazine. He considered Google’s ambitions audacious, so audacious that it couldn’t fully comprehend the implications of its program. Kelly, however, could discern them. The book was an ancient technology, and it was being profoundly disrupted by technology. Change would come imperceptibly, as the book slipped from the control of authors and publishers. Readers would seize the prerogative, exploiting technology to rework books to make them their own, mashing books into a new genre, something like Wikipedia pages. “The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before.”
It was the type of dream that McLuhan or Brand might have conjured. The network—the global community united by technology—would begin to melt the differences that separate us. One book would begin to dissolve into the next; copying and pasting and borrowing would blur all the distinctions that had once defined volumes. “In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book.” It was, as he admitted with his own choice of rhetoric, a religious dream. He described the future as the “Eden of everything.” There was a political corollary to this prelapsarian dream. Not only would volumes melt into one beautiful book, disagreements would fade, too. (This was Leibniz’s vision, revised and updated.) As readers worked together to annotate and edit texts, they would find common ground. The path of the network takes our most contentious debates and leads them toward consensus. Facebook puts it this way: “By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long term.”
But we know this is an illusion. Facebook leads us to a destination that is the precise opposite of its proclaimed ideal. It creates a condition that Eli Pariser has called the “Filter Bubble.” Facebook’s algorithms supply us with the material that we like to read and will feel moved to share. It’s not hard to see the intellectual and political perils of this impulse. The algorithms unwittingly supply readers with texts and videos that merely confirm deeply felt beliefs and biases; the algorithms suppress contrary opinions that might agitate a user. Liberals are deluged with liberal opinions; vegetarians are presented with endless vegetarian agitprop; the alt-right is fed alt-right garbage; and so on. Facebook shields us from the sort of challenging disagreement—although not from the idiocy of trolls and the blather of comments sections—that might change our minds or help us to better understand the views of our fellow citizens.
In economics, the peril of the network is monopoly—where a competitive market comes under the sway of big corporations. In culture, the peril of the network is conformism—where a competitive marketplace of ideas ceases to be so competitive, where the emphasis shifts to consensus. Kevin Kelly, in his enthusiasm, unwittingly conveyed the darker implications of his vision. He extolled the “hive mind”—which is what happens when we get past our fetish for the author and give in to crowdsourcing and wikis and the hordelike tendencies of social media, when we surrender ourselves to the wise crowd. The hive mind was meant to describe a thing of beauty, humanity working in gorgeous concert. But really, who would want to live in a hive? We know from history that this sort of consensus is a plastic beauty, a stifling sameness. It deadens disagreement, strangles originality.
This is true of our politics. Our era is defined by polarization, warring ideological gangs that yield no ground. Division, however, isn’t the root cause of our unworkable system. There are many causes, but a primary problem is conformism. Facebook has created two hive minds—the hive always has a queen bee—each residing in an ecosystem that nurtures head-nodding agreement and penalizes dissenting views. A hive mind is an intellectually incapacitated one, with diminishing ability to sort fact from fiction, with a bias toward evidence that confirms the party line. Facebook has managed to achieve consensus, but not quite as it promised. Instead of drawing the world together, the power of its network has helped tear it apart. Say all the ill things that can be said about our old ideas of genius and originality—none are worse than this.