Anil Dash has one of his furious posts up, reminiscing about the old social web that he and his friends dominated in the early years, and fulminating about all these greedy kids who became billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom of Instagram that are so unlike him and his altruistic buddies who just made cash with start-ups and consulting, but not THAT much cash, geez.
And Anil wants everyone to return to that bucolic, pastoral past of technocommunism, where everybody was equal and shared, and where people were "civil". You know, like the Well! (Or hey, the early days of Typepad when people like me could get paid by the company's ads, which they've now pulled if you don't have a big traffic? You mean like that lol?)
So...I've already responded to the bad ideological part of all that, but what is glaringly missing here?
Anil puts out a "mock-up" of how he thinks privacy and intellectual property rights could be handled with Facebook (and by extension, other big platforms), and uses as a model Creative Commons, which I call Creative Communism, as the foundation of his concept, like this:
So on your Facebook, you can be a meany and deny people the use of your content -- pictures, songs, designs, scripts, whatever -- OR you can be a good commie and let people use it for FREE but in exchange for tagging your name OR you don't care if they even do that, you are such a good commie!
NO OTHER CHOICES. JUST STARK, BRUTAL TECHNOCOMMUNISM.
The oligarchs keep making money off your ad clicks; they keep giving you free service, you keep giving them the free oil to grease their wheels in all your freely-distributed content, and at best, you get a pat on your head with your name tagged. Thanks, guys! Think I'll go back to farming game gold in Farmville! Not!
But there's another way, a way suggested to us by Larry Rosenthal (c3), who has always conceived of Creativity, Community, Commerce -- the three Cs -- as another vision for what digital content creation and sale and consumption could be on line.
So I re-fashioned Anil's silly commie dashboard as follows, and put the money part in for the normal people like us:
In my vision, there's a fourth option that takes you away from the technocommunism of the first three options where the craven platform holders and ideological commissars like Larry Lessig and Clay Shirky and all the rest force you to share your content for no pay. As Larry puts it:
The idea of Creative Commons has run astray, it has become a cult, one run by personality and a perverse agenda that as “marketed” leads to the destruction of all value beyond that of it’s founders fame. Those who create and exist in a “commercial society” MUST finally decide their value and not the value “assigned to them and their works” by a very few, living in university tenured , all fees and drinks paid for lecture circuit circle.
And that option must be this: RIGHT CLICK AND PAY ME DAMMIT!
C3 with commerce as the option is beautiful, and doable, and only ideology stands in the way. It only requires a little engineering that is no different than any pay site in the universe like Amazon or ebay, using PayPal or any other payment system. For extra credit, make a micropayments system with a separate microcurrency that hooks up to the games as well.
So if I see somebody's nice sunset picture they've shared with me, I can tip them and at least send them a quarter -- or whatever price they set.
If I want to use their picture on my Pinterest, I can pay them a quarter -- they deserve that much.
If I want to use their picture on my blog, I can pay them a quarter -- or maybe if they are really good photographers, they will set that price to one dollar or even five dollars, and I will gladly pay them.
They'll pay me, too, if I write a poem for them or a song or a script or make a design. And so on.
If I'm Coca Cola or Wal-Mart or Sony, I can return to the last century's concept of "paint the town red," and I can offer people to put my logos on their Facebook page or blog -- and get paid for doing that.
Or they can pay me for a picture of myself drinking the Coke. In fact, if we want to go further, we can make one payment box that is for ordinary people just wanting to tip a blog or pay a dollar to use a picture off Flickr or Facebook on their Pinterest or Typepad blog. And another box for commercial, high traffic blog or TV/radio rates.
Trust me, this is a wondeful, wonderful thing that can both save these gigantic platforms, usually only churning VC cash, from becoming dead dinosaurs in 10 years.
It can start creating that web 3.0 which has the 3D content and the ability to commodify digital creations and sell them (as in Second Life).
Finally, these lumbering beasts that suck out all our value and convert it into unstable cash for themselves will have a viable busines model for themselves and us!
The platforms can take a percentage of sales or a percentage of the cashout to PayPal or sell the microcurrencies -- just as Linden Lab does for 40,000-70,000 people who show up every day at secondlife.com to buy and sell, and make at least a $75 million profit for this little company, and something like $450 million a year in digital sales for the creators who are the prosumers of the platform.
Why is this so hard? Why don't we have this yet? Why are the engineers mumbling about security and difficulties that they don't for Amazon or the New York Times?
Because technocommunism. Because ideology. Because conservatism and pastoral ideals.
Bring on the modern age! Bring on the urban! Bring on Community, Creativity, Commerce!
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