Last week, a
New York Times opinion piece fired up my Facebook newsfeed. Titled “
Slaves of the Internet, Unite!” and penned by
Tim Kreider, the piece pleads with writers not to indulge in that pervasive and pernicious cultural habit: writing for free.
Kreider’s
op-ed is funny, smart, and over-the-top, which occasionally leads to
some stretching of his argument. (He compares his situation with that of
his sister the pulmonologist, saying no one asks her to perform a free
lobectomy in her spare time, but I’m not quite sure I buy the
comparison.) It also leads to gems that any writer struggling to eke out
a living will savor:
This is partly a side effect of
our information economy, in which “paying for things” is a quaint,
discredited old 20th-century custom, like calling people after having
sex with them. The first time I ever heard the word “content” used in
its current context, I understood that all my artist friends and I —
henceforth, “content providers” — were essentially extinct.
And this:
Not
getting paid for things in your 20s is glumly expected, even sort of
cool; not getting paid in your 40s, when your back is starting to hurt
and you are still sleeping on a futon, considerably less so. Let’s call
the first 20 years of my career a gift. Now I am 46, and would like a
bed.
Kreider ends with a rallying cry asking other
writers not to give it away for free, so as to help lift the boat for
all of us, or however that metaphor goes.
When I read Kreider’s
piece, part of me immediately wanted to trumpet his message everywhere;
another part of me admitted all too readily that the issue is complicated.
In this day and age, writing for free brings with it real benefits, the
most obvious of which is the chance to write for money; that’s how mine
and I’m sure countless other careers started.
People tend to
blame the internet for the downfall of the livable writing wage, which I
think is probably accurate. People also tend to laud the internet for
bringing a greater number and wider range of voices into the cultural
conversation, which I think is probably accurate as well. But writing —
like art — still has a major diversity problem, as well as a gender one. We remain far from the utopian democratization proposed by the evangelists of Web 2.0.
One
aspect of the diversity-in-writing discussion that I’ve found
noticeably absent is any mention of class, most likely because you’d
need real, hard data to understand the economic backgrounds of working
writers. But I venture to guess that if you did have the results, you’d
find a whole lot of people who come from middle- and upper-class
backgrounds and not so many from lower.
Choosing writing as a
profession is an economic risk. Having a safety net, like a family
you’re pretty sure won’t let you don’t end up homeless, helps. Easy
access to education also helps, both emotionally (confidence) and
materially (contacts, connections). A sense of entitlement definitely
doesn’t hurt. A recent opinion piece in the
Guardian by Chris Arnade, a Wall Street banker–turned–photographer, was overly simplistic but made a solid point:
I
am able to take risks as an artist because I have money. … we rarely
hear the stories of the poor as told by them. If they are told, it is by
other artists who come into the neighborhood and interpret what they
see.
Paying writers — and artists, and musicians, and
photojournalists, etc. — matters, for a myriad of reasons. One of the
strongest is that, without it, we’ll never really achieve that
long-overdue democratization. Not until we find a way to make these
creative pursuits viable professions.
http://hyperallergic.com/90638/dont-give-it-away-for-free/
