I saw one of those “personal pleas” for a donation the other day on Wikipedia. The one that particularly vexed me was from one of their programmers: “I work at the Wikimedia Foundation because everything in my soul tells me it’s the right thing to do.” It goes on from there, but you get the drift.
I love it when people talk about their souls and what’s “right.” History’s full of these people and their versions of that feeling: manifest destiny, the Lord’s work, White man’s burden. They all thought they were on the side of the angels. That’s easy when you don’t count the bodies at the foundation of the structure.
The Internet types are just as sickening as the Wall Street goons. Stop telling me about your soul. Stop putting your sanctimonious left hand in my pocket to lift my nearly empty wallet while your holier-than-thou right hand slides the knife betwixt two of my ribs. Your organizations that leverage slave labor into profit for a coterie of top-tier executives while destroying wage-paying positions in the process have already taken tens of thousands of dollars in lost wages and missed opportunities out of my pocket. I really don’t have any more to give so that you can pat yourselves on the back about how vital and important and soul-fulfilling your work is while you impoverish me a little more with each passing year. So have enough decency to not complain about how small the portion on your plate is while I’m digging through a trash can looking for some leftovers.
Just cut the crap.
Now, before some Internet moran starts lecturing me about how this is simply “the nature of the beast,” and how the Internet is creating jobs, just knock it off. The Internet eliminates whole lateral chunks of the employment pyramid, especially at the bottom. The only way a web site has “tens of thousands” of employees is if you count the peons. Amazon? I have no idea how many people it employs, but if it’s tens of thousands without counting all the hourly workers who toil in factories filling orders, I’ll eat a cardboard shipping box. Facebook employs something like 1,600 people. Internet companies do not have larger staffs than their real-world counterparts. They can’t, except in a very few instances. A buggywhip factory will have a smaller IT staff than the New York Times, yes, but as a general case, the Internet eliminates jobs or exchanges them for positions that pay less.
The Internet taps into a lot of people who don’t have the economic sense to realize that slave labor drives out wage labor. We’re now at a point where technology and idiocy (always a bad combination) have united to turn the middle class into a self-consuming entity. And who’s helping to shove the tail of the snake into its own mouth? The people at Wikipedia, the Internet morans, and the corporate executives who see how much of a short-term gain they can make by hacking wages to zero.
And now that all the low-hanging fruit has been claimed, the effect is spreading. Lawyers are discovering their work is being outsourced with greater frequency. X-rays are now examined overseas by physicians who’ll do it for less. Ask ANY doctor about that. It’s a bad practice. It’s only going to get worse, everyone.
So, Wikipedia, stop crying poor-mouth at me. I’m not interested in rewarding you for what your ilk did. I’ve had to watch co-workers in their late 50s crying uncontrollably as they were made to pack their things and leave. An entire lifetime of playing by the rules culminating in a kick in the pants so that some clever programmer could feel like he was helping to usher in a new age. Well, here’s the brave new world. The lumpen masses are now so conditioned to being handed the final, finished fruits of so many forms of labor for free that those of us who still want to be paid a living wage for what we do are simply side-stepped by “some kid” (or some Wikipedia programmer) who doesn’t understand that doing it for free is never going to end up in a full-time job. Starry-eyed “volunteers” race to be one of the many who hand in “research” for free. And where do they get that research? Oh, they very carefully document that they lifted it from one of the few traditional sources that still pay for labor. The whole thing reminds me of the ubiquitous assertion of innocence: “Hey, if I didn’t do it, someone else would.”
I wonder when all the Wikipedians, the HuffPosters, the Kossacks and the rest will arrive at the point where they realize that they can’t quite cover the bills anymore. When even the contract at-will employee positions start to disappear. Most of us, regrettably, won’t be there to see it.
19 Comments.
Hey I sympthise with the view on the internet. All I can recommend is when choosing a job, make sure that it can’t be outsourced, either over the internet or easily on the caprice of a CEO.
Around the time I started reading Ted Rall, I wanted to be a reporter. I observed the reporter scene where I was and what it was like in America. I more or less came to the conclusion, that I was better off with my preferred white collar option.
As we all know by now, the paperless office is a myth.
Okay, here’s an experiment done by Louis CK relating to web content. The obvious part is that the person pulling the money in was a guy like Louis CK, a brand name with a wide and general appeal.
Ted’s stuff on the other hand is very specialised. So here it is:
Something for Louis C. K. to Smile About: His Internet Comedy Special Is Profitable
Statement from Louis CK
All that it seems it depends on for Ted, is that the whole thing have a wider appeal. Louis CK isn’t Bill Hicks. But he’s not George Carlin either. Good luck with that.
Am currently listening to the Proopcast.
Free stuff, recorded at bars, with paid tickets. I know Ted isn’t a performer, but maybe a paid lecture circuit gig, with limited sampling online.
Sounds tiring. And hard on my liver, since I’d need to drink afterward.
“The Internet types are just as sickening as the Wall Street goons.”
“Stop putting your sanctimonious left hand in my pocket to lift my nearly empty wallet while your holier-than-thou right hand slides the knife betwixt two of my ribs.”
“You impoverish me a little more with each passing year.”
@alex: So now internet programmers are to blame for your current situation? Who’s next on the blame list? It’ll be someone other than yourself, that much is 100% certain. I can’t wait to find out.
This rant is not even worth responding to, and I hope no one will. It’s a rant, not cogent analysis.
@Ted: If this is where your site is headed, pity. I like reading your pieces and op-eds, but I’m not interested in emotional rants by posters. Such material is suited for the comments section, and shouldn’t be published as top-level content.
Sorry you feel that way. I figure, if you don’t like a particular poster, you can just skip their stuff. When I come across a poster who seems interested in contributing his/her thoughts, and has a track record of smart posts, I feel like it’s fun to let them have a voice. After all, I don’t post to this blog with nearly the regularity that I should.
@exkiodexian
Alex did not rant against the Internet programmers, but against the Internet salespeople who lie through their teeth. And against the people who believe them. And against the people who work for them for free and make them rich while driving paid workers out of business.
The 13th amendment offers no protection to those who voluntarily agree to work all day for free, and while they don’t deserve any protection or sympathy, the people who were formerly able to sell their work might have a legitimate complaint.
This is the equivalent of someone complaining about volunteers collecting money for Charity and taking work away from people who could be paid to do that. People that are building habitat for humanity houses, being assholes they are, are taking jobs from carpenters, and people who give to charity are taking jobs away from clothing stores by limiting the money made doing that. Face it, the unintended consequence of doing something for someone for free, is someone is not getting paid to do it, this is why Unions don’t allow the guy that stocks the milk to stock the salt too. However, the flip side of that is, hey a bunch of information that would have been very difficult to find in the past no longer is, and it allows people to share their limited knowledge toward something bigger, the Irony is, you think the Wikipedia volunteers are assholes for having a belief system, and being proud of what they do, yet you believe its wrong to do something for free, because it might take work away from someone who could be paid, therefore you have a belief of something that is right, and something that is wrong. I guess when I helped that old lady change her tire, I was actually bankrupting a towing company and mechanic….
I don’t dispute (or would I want to), the point of view expressed here. But let me add mine, please. I’m a programmer. I am fortunate enough to have a job (that hasn’t yet been outsourced) working for a small software company which has several security products. We use open-source software for a good part of the underpinnings of our software. Were it not for this supporting software, the company, which employees more than a hundred people, would not exist. We could never have started up because we would have had to (1) build the support software ourselves or (2) buy it. Given our small startup bankroll, neither option would have worked. So, thanks to volunteer programmers who produced a high-quality “product”, I can feed my kids, pay my mortgage and almost afford gasoline. So my point of view is this: Thank you, volunteer programmers of the Internet…without your dedication and time, I’d probably be in a homeless shelter today.
@LessThanUseful,
Thanks for the comment. You make an interesting point. I’ll counter with this. Martin Niemöller is credited with observing that the Nazis came “for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.” You point out that you can barely afford gas and you’d probably be in a shelter today if it weren’t for the volunteer programmers. When you arrive at the point where you’re walking into the homeless shelter, it will be too late. Niemöller understood this. The CEOs understand it, too.
@patron002,
“This is the equivalent of someone complaining about volunteers collecting money for Charity and taking work away from people who could be paid to do that.” That’s a false equivalence. The volunteers can’t pull the money from my pocket. Charity is a single-use function. If I give someone (or an organization) $25, that money is used to feed people or clothe them. That money goes back into the system. Wikipedia is more like something that eliminates the $25 in the first place. It prevents that money from ever being earned.
“This is why Unions don’t allow the guy that stocks the milk to stock the salt too.” Absolutely. Now. Humor me for a second. Let’s assume everyone does everything for free. And you run a business. Are you going to hire someone who wants to be paid, or someone who wants salt-stocking to be free? Now, apply it wholesale. You will make a bundle, for a little while. And then you will have to close your store because no one is able to afford salt anymore.
“I guess when I helped that old lady change her tire, I was actually bankrupting a towing company and mechanic….”
Your examples are simply, well, infantile. In this example you cite, it’s one old lady’s tire. What if you were able to change EVERY flat tire for EVERY old lady? That’s the analogy that more closely represents what I’m talking about. The wholesale Internetization of the work force. Not for some high-flown moral cause — not for someone’s soul and what it’s whispering to them — but because the CEOs want to pay every single person they can the lowest amount possible. Ask a college freshman who has taken one economics course about this. Then ask Paul Krugman. They’ll both tell you the same thing. Frederick Douglass talked about it in his autobiography back in the 19th century: slavery drives out paying jobs. And it doesn’t matter if the slave is miserable or content.
I think it is possible for both LessThenUseful and Alex the Tired to be correct here. Charity is an interesting thing, and it is well documented that depending on how it is done or applied it can be either helpful or extremely hurtful. An interesting example is the donation of clothes to Africa. The US and much of the Western world actually donates a tremendous amount of clothes to Africa almost constantly. The result? It has completely destroyed all the local African textile industries, clothing stores as well as all the peripheral infrastructure and jobs related to these industries in the targeted areas of Africa. To add insult to injury those Africans not only have fewer jobs but they are also now dependent on clothing donation as they basically have no other alternative ways to obtain clothing. Does this make charity bad? No, it doesn’t even make donating clothing bad necessarily, it just means donating clothes in this manner is particularly bad. Simply a different strategy needs to be worked out that doesn’t undermine key local economies.
Similarly I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with the good natured free work that the people of wikipedia, the Huffington Post and other such entities provide, but Alex is right, those systems have reached a point where they have become severely exploitative and it is detrimentally impacting all of us. In spite of their likely good intentions upon creation, these institutions have become systems with strong negative influence equivalent to that of donating clothes to Africa but for us here at home. There is nothing inherently wrong with free software, free online encyclopedias, ect… many people, such as LessThenUseful, can easily supply us with examples where such entities were vital to their livelyhood and carriers. However a few people who would not have otherwise been clothed in Africa can also add some positive notes to the current implementation of the clothing donation scheme there in spite of it more or less destroying their society at large.
Technology and Charity can be good things, but sometimes their implementations and the way that we are expected to contribute to them or how to use them become abusive and destructive making them more bad then good. The solution isn’t to do away with them but to analyze their implementations and adjust them accordingly to make sure they work for us as intended. Wikipedia and co have demonstrated that people can both want to lend their free time to it and that we all can benefit from this in certain respects, but these institutions either need to start paying their full time workers or at the very least stop leaching everyone’s time and money away just to undercut and thereby undermine paid employment while simultaneously implicitly endorsing slave labor. Web 2.0 is still just very new, society has seen its promise but wasn’t ready to figure out how to pay its price. We need to seriously sit down and work out web 2.1, the version with all the same features we love but none of the socially destructive “bugs” in the implementation that came about from too hasty a release of 2.0.
Also I tend to agree with Ted here. I don’t always care for Alex’s posts, but the fact is no one is forcing you to read them and Alex’s postings only add more free content to the Rall blog for your perusal. When Alex gets to post this doesn’t stop Ted from doing work. You are not getting less Ted, just extra free content that may or may not be to your taste.
Incidentally though this leads me to point out the irony of Alex providing free content on a free blog on the internet in which he complains about the travesty of people providing free content on various free entities on the internet. I am not accusing him of hypocrisy or even suggesting that this invalidates the thesis of his oped. I am simply pointing out that what compelled him to write and post this is the same well intentioned mind set that drives all of the people to do all of the things he is complaining about here. It is all well meaning and potentially beneficial, it just has some serious social side effects when done en mass that need to be worked out.
Someone,
There used to be places where people got paid to post content. They were called newspapers. And we’re back to the point I’ve been trying to make for years now. It’s called Gresham’s Law: Bad money drives out good. Apply it to jobs: low-pay wages drive out high-pay wages, and I don’t care how much BS the CEOs and their followers spread, we’re seeing an economy in which the good-paying jobs are being wiped out by people with no economics awareness. It’s like the Republican talking points about cutting taxes on the rich leading to job creation. If the Internet is creating jobs, where the hell are they? Why is there a 16% unemployment rate in a country in which everyone and his uncle has some sort of Internet-linked device?
@Alex, Yes, I don’t disagree with anything you have posted here. But the fact is people do want to put up free content on the internet, your willingness to post for free on the Rall blog are just as much a demonstration of that as the Huffington post or Wikipedia. There are good sentiments here that drive people to want to do this and to actually do this, but you are right, it is bad economic sense when aggregated as a whole across many people doing this at once.
For better or worse the internet is here to stay and so are the types of institutions web 2.0 has generated. As I have said every time so far, you are right, this has taken far more jobs then it has created. However, as there are good sentiments there, this is something people want to do (again you are doing it here on the Rall blog), some good things come of this as per the example via LessThenUseful, and because the internet and these institutions cannot be gotten rid of, we need to think of a new way forward not back. (NOTE: Thomas Freedman would approve of the length of the previous sentence, but would probably still inform me that he could do better in the lengthy rambling department.) Yes newspapers had this all worked out as you say, but now we need to work it out for web 2.0 with the Huffington post and there ilk.
In this series of posts here you have identified and outlined an important problem that is seriously afflicting us all, but responding to it by pining for the past will not help anyone. We just need to think about things going forward. The issue is that new technology and its adoption by society have occurred faster then society was able to evolve to use such technology and the institutions it spawns sustainably with respect to itself. The question is not how do we go back in time, but how do we reshape things, get society to evolve, so that society and all that is recently new work together instead of grind each other apart in spite of good intentions.
My example may or may not be infantile, but in the scheme of things so is your, Wikipedia didn’t cost very many people their job, on its own. As far as I can tell the people that work for Wikipedia are untrained, poorly qualified, and doing it in their spare time FOR FUN. I am sorry, but if your job can be done by a bored 12 year old after he or she has smoked a blunt, maybe your job shouldn’t require a college degree, or any pay above minimum wage, again wikipedia is basically ran by bored people in their spare time, so if you were getting paid to do that job, realistically you were getting paid to do nothing.
@Patron: I love Wikipedia but it can’t replace encyclopedias written by scholars. Also, it certainly did eliminate paying jobs (at Britannica and elsewhere).
@Ted, I am going to have to disagree with you there. Wikipedia has, most unfortunately, damaged a lot of jobs and has become an exploitative entity. However, it is not an inferior product to traditional encyclopedias. Yes, there is a ton of bad politics and behavior and even outright sinister things that takes place at Wikipedia behind the scenes. This is all immediately recognizable by just briefly glancing at documentation from the various Wikipedia watchdog institutions like the Wikipedia Review and, the now apparently defunct, Wikipedia Watch by Daniel Brandt. I can personally name a long list of articles that are clearly co-opted by corporate propagandist stooges who are fast to try and establish IP bans of any and all editors who inject some unbiased truth into their delicately prepared propaganda pie. (I also can list some of the Wikipedia editors who are these corporate propagandists, but I am not going to do so publicly, as they will just disappear by starting new accounts associated with fresh IP addresses via a new set of proxy servers and then I will have to laboriously hunt them down yet again.)
Yet all of this scandalous bullshit is also true of all the old professional encyclopedias as well. However, one key difference is there are fewer watchdog institutions of traditional encyclopedias, let alone those comprised of active insiders, then there are of Wikipedia. This makes Wikipedia, at least indirectly a better policed or at least documented institution. Furthermore on scholarly review, both Wikipedia and encyclopedia Britannica were considered to be about equally accurate overall (roughly 96%). Wikipedia has more articles that include more esoteric topics with most articles being far more in-depth then in any traditional encyclopedia. Taken all together I would argue Wikipedia is actually a superior product in most regards where it isn’t equivalent in quality to traditional encyclopedias.
Also many people who have worked for traditional encyclopedias still have a more favorable opinion of Wikipedia. If you want an example, look to the late Randy Pausch who was invited by real encyclopedias to write articles typically pertaining to virtual reality and related subjects of which he was a scholarly expert and active contributor to cutting edge developments. In his book, “The Last Lecture” Mr. Pausch points out that no one reviewed or challenged any part of any of the articles he wrote for actual encyclopedias. He was free to write anything he wanted with whatever slant he wished (presumably so long as it wasn’t immediately obvious to everyone that it was riddled with personal points of view or other bias) and his articles would always be published verbatim minus maybe a few grammatical touch ups. Meanwhile when he wrote Wikipedia articles he found that other experts in the field actual did find, review, amend, and usefully edit them. As such he claimed that Wikipedia actually seemed to him to be the more rigorous peer reviewed institution relative to the various traditional encyclopedias that he wrote for, avidly purchased, and sometimes even read cover to cover during the course of his life.
Quoth Alex: The Internet taps into a lot of people who don’t have the economic sense to realize that slave labor drives out wage labor.
If you substituted your poetic license “slave labor”, for voluntary, free labor I’d agree wholeheartedly: slaves don’t have an option as to whether they give their labor or not.
Of course, you and the rest of the lefties here don’t have the economic sense to follow through that reasoning and realize that minimum wage laws drive out low wage paying jobs, do you?
Oh, I agree Wikipedia is fun, but its not serious at all. For actual important information you are still going to use real sources. The real problem is the internet offers a rare gift, you can find something somewhere that will support whatever incorrect view you have. The real reason that encyclopedia is dead is because people prefer to find facts they can agree with over actual fact.