Lanier dealt with the automation side of Work’s New Age, the
name I use for our era starting in 1973, in ways that build on the thesis of the
book of that name I released a year and a half ago. He outdid my examples of eBay and Twitter
being major innovations without General Motors-level job counts, by naming
Instagram and its succession of much of 14,000-worker Kodak with 13 employees. Related to my prediction of more resources
coming from communities, he discussed how much work is being done in them
without what he called “formal benefits” such as wages and other
compensation. He said that we were
losing a tacit agreement that work should be paid, even when easy and
enjoyable, and that would mean, in effect, the end of the middle class. Although it might be well and good for people
to get nonmonetary advantages for tasks they perform, that would not be enough –
as he put it in an interview in Salon
last month, “when I talk to libertarians and socialists, they have this weird
belief that everybody’s this abstract robot that won’t ever get sick or have
kids or get old.” And, I might add,
eat.
Even more disturbing, Lanier talked about the end of
democracy, caused by people not being able to participate in the market and “outspend
the top.” Channeling Work’s New Age
Principle #13, he said that “markets can only function if there are customers,”
and said that “winner-take-all capitalism” could not survive.
I could go on comparing Lanier’s ideas and mine – although I
do not know if he ever saw Work’s New Age,
they are intertwined when not essentially identical – but one of his notions, mentioned
by me but developed more by him, is worthy of special attention and
concern. For decades now, we have had more
and more people paid not by salary but for each assignment. In California, they called that the “movie
model,” whereas, with my background, I knew it as the “project model.” It seemed to make good sense for everyone –
the professionals would earn more per day of concentrated work, and could then move
on to other efforts with other organizations, as their skills would still be in
high demand. They would be free to
choose which ones they wanted, and to take time off for training, education, or
personal reasons. There would be no annual
limit of three vacation weeks.
Independent contractors, working anywhere from a day to several years, have
become more general examples of this trend.
Such entrepreneurs, and in effect that is what they are, could use
social networks to ensure maximum efficiency in finding gigs, which is also the
right way of thinking about such short-term engagements.
The point Lanier made is that such a system, even in fields
with high demand for work, frequently does not succeed. He gave an example from the world of hip-hop
music, which has been using such a scheme for a long time, and said that only
about 50 performers in the country are actually “making a great living” that
way, or have solidly middle-class annual, not daily, incomes. He estimated, even with good demand, easy
marketing connectivity, and people with ever-increasing technical skills, that
number for all areas of music in the United States to be in a “low number of
hundreds.” By comparison, as of 2010
there were still 176,000 people employed by
others as musicians and singers. When
you add the pressures of being in effect in business for yourself, and the need
to, as Lanier put it, “sing for your supper for every meal,” we have a
problem.
So it is with other creative fields. Most independent authors earn little or
nothing. The millions of blogs like this
one rarely provide a solid income, and often provide none at all. Last month, the Chicago Sun-Times laid off its entire photography staff. Lanier called those with such creative
occupations “the canary in the digital coal mine,” as other professions would
soon be in the same situation. Even
those who have great success among huge numbers in their fields aren’t doing
nearly as well as comparable people working for others, as per Lanier’s example
of a towering YouTube star, one Jenna Marbles who has had a billion views of
her videos teaching young women about makeup and the like, and earns about
$250,000, much the same as most, not just a few, of America’s 691,000
physicians and surgeons.
When labor doesn’t get paid as it used to, what permanent solutions
are there? In Work’s New Age I advocated a guaranteed income, not enough for the
lifestyles to which most of us have been accustomed, but, along with universal
health care, enough to ensure a reasonable survival. Since then I have also come out in favor of
shortened work hours. Lanier recommended
micropayments for people making now-free creative content.
That could help, but would that be enough? We will need to address that issue sooner
than some may think. The possible end to
federal money-creating programs may force the issue, as if we get a recession
even those who think the jobs crisis is temporary will soon remember these below-10%-unemployment
days as good times. We don’t know the
right way out of it, but we need to start talking.
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