Earlier this week, an attorney friend invited me to the New York Tech Meetup at NYU’s Skirball center. It’s the largest of the New York Meetups, and it borders on being the largest Meetup in the nation.
(Apparently San Franciscans like technology and meetups even more than New Yorkers. They are after all, the seat of the Federation of Planets in Star Trek. But more on that in a minute.)
There, I met some very friendly people who spoke a very different language from me at times. They have their own vernacular, and to my ears one of the most cold and alien-sounding words I kept encountering was “content.” You’ll hear it floating around a lot wherever tech meets art and media.
“Content” is essentially a catch-all term for the things human beings care about most: Books, music, information, films, stories, recipes, TV shows, human interaction, that kind of thing. You know, the stuff that the majority of people are hoping to find whenever they type a word into Google. That’s “content.”
I understand that language evolves, and if this word is going to be a dominant one, then I’d like suggest we start referring to the products the technology sector creates as “Containers”. Because, with a few exceptions, that seems to be what all the fuss is about: Digital containers. New delivery mechanisms for the same old stuff. Byte-sized barrels for art, information, and design.
There are two basic business models for this huge new “container” business. These containers can either be frictionless and essentially free to the user (like YouTube and Facebook) or the containers can be fairly expensive themselves (like an iPad.)
There are some products that borrow strategies from both of those models (like the Amazon Fire) and there’s even a big, healthy market for containers within the containers (called Apps.)
But the “content” itself ? All that stuff that people are using all these containers to contain? Not so much.
People who sell containers like for the contents to be free. In the ink-and-paper era, many publishers would have loved to pay authors $0. In fact, in the beginning, a lot of them did just that.
We’ve seen this very same dynamic every time a new medium has been introduced: At first, the container-makers are resistant to paying the people who make the “contents” even though the contents are usually the biggest selling-point. They also offer compelling arguments as to how they’re working in the interest of human progress by reducing friction between ideas and between people.
There’s some validity to arguments like these, and some artists will usually agree wholeheartedly at first. That is, until the economic realities set in. Then, they get together and lobby for change, spurring the creation of powerful new legal reform.
This has happened each and every time we’ve introduced a new medium: It’s happened with books, with film, with radio and with recorded music. Along with the medium there has been a period of non-payment to artists, followed by a period of fair payment thanks to new regulations and new enforcement.
(I’ve heard arguments from the tech sector as to why this kind of change shouldn’t come from group advocacy and legal reform, but I’ve yet to hear of an example of when it hasn’t.
I have however, heard plenty of suggestions that artists, writers, musicians and journalists should effectively become marketers and merchandisers instead. To me, that’s not the same thing.)
The tech sector has it pretty easy right now, so if they’re holding on hard to a narrow perspective that’s worked for them, that’s understandable.
The truth is that today the technologists are at the point where the book and film and music industries were at their peak: the bloated stage. Everyone has a product, and everyone’s investing. A derivative idea, a few lines of code and a few good connections are all you need to attract a lowly sum of $1.5 million for investment.
In a world like that, it doesn’t matter too much if you product doesn’t make money. What matters is that you’ve given your investors a shot at the roulette wheel, that you’ve given them a feeling of glamour and of inclusion. Just as it was with the old media ventures, most new technology products won’t be financial successes, but a few big wins help float an entire sub-industry of vaporware.
I’m not arguing that these kinds of dynamics shouldn’t occur. For better and worse, they do. I’m only suggesting that we’re over-investing in one side of the equation (the containers) and that it has to (and will) snap back.
The biggest advancement the tech sector has made in the past decade has been to bring their innovations to a startling level of efficiency in which they’ve essentially created Star Trek’s replicator, but for digital content.
To be honest, I’d love for all art and media to be free. But until we live in a Star Trek–style futurtopia where all food, housing and medical care is free thanks to general all-purpose replicators, not all art and media can be free.
For one, it’s unsustainable for only our artists and reporters and thinkers to be the ones giving freely. And for two? As we get ever-closer to our threshold for an over-abundance of free and lousy media, art that we appreciate enough to invest in becomes even more valuable.
There’s 3rd factor at play as well. When we lost the old publishers, we lost something else along with them. We lost many of our best curators and our editors, our patrons and our refiners of taste and of talent.
I’m sure that in a Star Trek economy, we would find a place for them too. Someone must have cared about usefully regulating those machines. We’re seeing that start to happen again now. Just like it’s happened many times before.