Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (55 page)

“If I alert my entire customer base, how much will this cost me in permission?”

“How much time do we save our customers with a better-written manual?”

“When we fail to ask for (and reward) the privilege of following up, are we wasting permission?”

“Does launching this product to an audience of strangers waste the attention we’re going to have to buy?”

Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they’re not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value.

Fifty years ago, the ratio was a million to one.

For every person on the news or on primetime, there were a million viewers.

The explosion of magazines brought the ratio to 100,000:1. If you wrote for a major magazine, you were going to affect a lot of people. Most of us were consumers, not creators.

Cable TV and ’zines made the ratio 10,000:1. You could have a show about underwater spear fishing, or you could teach people how to make hamburgers with doughnuts for rolls. The little star was born.

And now of course, when it’s easy to have a blog or a YouTube account, or to push your ideas to the world through social media, the ratio might be 100:1. For every person who sells on Etsy, there are 100 buyers. For every person who actively tweets, there are 100 people who mostly consume those tweets. For every 100 visitors to Squidoo, there is one new person building pages.

What does the world look like when we get to the next zero?

Why are we surprised that governments and organizations are lining up to control ideas and the way they spread?

When power resided in property, governments and corporations became focused on the ownership, regulation, and control of property.

When power shifted to machines and interstate commerce, no surprise, the attention shifted as well.

Now, we see that the predictions have come true, and it’s ideas and connections and permission and data that truly matter.

So gifted inventors shift gears and become patent trolls, suing instead of merely creating. So government agencies rush to turn off cell phone towers. So corporations work to extend and reinvent the very notion of copyright protection.

Here’s what we need to think about:

Are copyright rules being played with as a way to encourage the creation of art (which was the original intent), or are they now a tool for maximizing corporate profit?

Are patents (particularly software patents) being used to encourage new inventions, or have they turned into a tax that all of us have to pay whenever we use a computer or a phone? (Hint: if you can draw your patent on an index card, it’s an idea, not a patentable process worthy of protection.)

Is disconnecting a cell phone or a social network any different from trashing a printing press?

When organizations seek to control widgets and hammers and land, it seems right—that property is clearly private, and sharing it doesn’t scale. When two people both try to eat a marshmallow, there’s less for both.

Controlling ideas and connections and data—that’s a fundamentally different deal, partly because it’s so personal (that idea in your head might or might not have been inspired by the idea I wrote down, but it feels wrong for me to tell you that you can’t have your idea) and partly because shared ideas do scale; they don’t usually diminish.

Ideas are going to continue to become more valuable, which means that the urge to control and patrol them is going to increase.

• Ideas that spread, win.
  
• Networks in which ideas flow are worth more than networks without ideas.
  
• Great ideas are amplified when others build on them.
  
• Just because an idea spreads doesn’t mean it’s good for us.
  
• Locking down ideas makes them worth less.
  
• Those in power will try to keep outsiders from bringing new ideas forward.
  

[Rick asked for my distinction between an idea and an invention. Here goes:

I think an idea is something you can write about in a science-fiction book.

An invention is the thing you build that was deemed impossible by the people who read about it in the science-fiction book.]

There are actually two recessions:

The first is the cyclical one, the one that inevitably comes and then inevitably goes. There’s plenty of evidence that intervention can shorten it, and there are indications that overdoing a response to it is a waste or even harmful.

The other recession, though, the one with the loss of “good factory jobs” and systemic unemployment—I fear that this recession is here forever.

Why do we believe that traditional jobs—jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual, and/or exported—are going to come back
ever
? The Internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity, and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.

There’s a race to the bottom, one in which communities fight to suspend labor and environmental rules in order to become the world’s cheapest supplier. The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win.

Factories were at the center of the industrial age. Buildings where workers came together to efficiently craft cars, pottery, and insurance policies—these are job-centric activities, places where local inefficiencies are trumped by the gains from mass production and interchangeable parts. If local labor costs the industrialist more, he has to pay it, because what choice does he have?

No longer. If it can be systemized, it will be. If the pressured middleman can find a cheaper source, she will. If the unaffiliated consumer can save a nickel by clicking over here or over there, then that’s what’s going to happen.

It was the inefficiency caused by geography that permitted local workers to earn a better wage, and it was the inefficiency of imperfect communication that allowed companies to charge higher prices.

The industrial age, the one that started with the Industrial Revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy, and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

This state of affairs represents a significant discontinuity, a life-changing disappointment for hardworking people who are hoping for stability but are unlikely to get it. It’s a recession, the recession of a hundred years of the growth of the industrial complex.

I’m not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new
opportunities. Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing that ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn’t look like a job, or not a full-time one, anyway.

When everyone has a laptop and a connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some people see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a “real” job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn’t a birthright for a tiny minority but is something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

Gears are going to be shifted regardless. In one direction is lowered expectations and plenty of burger flipping. In the other is a race to the top, in which individuals who are awaiting instructions begin to give them instead.

The future feels a lot more like marketing—it’s impromptu, it’s based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people—and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.

This means we may need to change our expectations, change our training, and change how we engage with the future. Still, it’s better than fighting for a status quo that is no longer. The good news is clear: every forever recession is followed by a lifetime of growth from the next thing.

Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we
like
the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done.

This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.

Since the invention of media (the book, the record, the movie …), there’s been a pyramid of value and pricing delivered by those that create the media:

Starting from the bottom:

Free content is delivered to anyone who is willing to consume it, usually as a way of engaging attention and leading to sales of content down the road. This is the movie trailer, the guest on
Oprah
, the free chapter, the tweets highlighting big ideas.

Mass content is the inevitable result of a medium for which the cost of making copies is low. So you get books for $20, movie tickets for $8, and newspapers for pocket change. Mass content has been the engine of popular culture for a century.

Limited content is something rare, and thus more expensive. It’s the ticket that not everyone can afford to buy. This is a seat in a Broadway theater, attendance at a small seminar, or a signed lithograph.

And finally, there’s bespoke content. This is the truly expensive, truly limited performance. A unique painting, or hiring a singer to appear at an event.

Three things just happened:

A
. Almost anyone can now publish almost anything. You can publish a book without a publisher, record a song without a label, host a seminar without a seminar company, sell your art without a gallery. This
freedom leads to an explosion of choice. (Or from the point of view of the media producer, an explosion of clutter and competition.)

B
. Because of A, attention is worth more than ever before. The single gating factor for almost all success in media is, “do people know enough about it to choose to buy something?”

C
. The marginal cost of one more copy in the digital world is precisely zero. One more viewer on YouTube, one more listener to your MP3, one more blog reader—they cost the producer nothing to produce or deliver.

As a result of these three factors, there’s a huge sucking sound, and that’s the erosion of mass as part of the media model. Fewer people buying movie tickets and hardcover books, more people engaging in free media.

Overlooked in all the hand-wringing is a rise in the willingness of some consumers (true fans) to move up the pyramid and engage with limited works. Is this enough to replace the money that’s not being spent on mass? Of course not. But no one said it was fair.

By head count, just about everyone who works in the media industry is in the business of formalizing, reproducing, distributing, marketing, and selling copies of the original creative work to the masses. The creators aren’t going to go away—they have no choice but to create. What’s in for a radical shift, though, is the infrastructure built around monetizing work that used to have a marginal cost but no longer does.

Media projects of the future will be cheaper to build, faster to market, less staffed with expensive marketers, and more focused on creating free media that earns enough attention to pay for itself with limited patronage.

Social media has amplified two basic human needs so much that they have been transformed into entirely new behaviors.

Sites have encouraged and rewarded us to
spout
, to talk about what we’re up to and what we care about.

And they’ve mirrored that by making it easy to
scout
, to see what others are spouting about.

Please understand that just a decade ago, both behaviors were private, non-commercial activities. Now, they represent the future of media, and thus the future of what we do all day.

You’re probably doing one, the other, or both. Are you making it easy for your peers and customers to do it about and for you?

The map keeps getting redrawn, because it’s cheaper than ever to go off-road, to develop and innovate and remake what we thought was going to be next. Technology keeps changing the routes we take to get our projects from here to there. It doesn’t pay to memorize the route, because it’s going to change soon.

The compass, on the other hand, is more important than ever. If you don’t know in which direction you’re going, how will you know when you’re off course?

And yet …