If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This is my last Pluralistic post of the year, and rather than round up my most successful posts of the year, I figured I’d write a little about why it’s impossible for me to do that, and why that is by design, and what that says about the arts, monopolies, and creative labor markets.
I started Pluralistic nearly five years ago, and from the outset, I was adamant that I wouldn’t measure my success through quantitative measures. The canonical version of Pluralistic – the one that lives at pluralistic.net – has no metrics, no analytics, no logs, and no tracking. I don’t know who visits the site. I don’t know how many people visit the site. I don’t know which posts are most popular, and which ones are the least popular. I can’t know any of that.
The other versions of Pluralistic are less ascetic, but only because there’s no way for me to turn off some metrics on those channels. The Mailman service that delivers the (tracker-free) email version of Pluralistic necessarily has a system for telling me how many subscribers I have, but I have never looked at that number, and have no intention of doing so. I have turned off notifications when someone signs up for the list, or resigns from it.
The commercial, surveillance-heavy channels for Pluralistic – Tumblr, Twitter – have a lot of metrics, but again, I don’t consult them. Medium and Mastodon have some metrics, and again, I just pretend they don’t exist.
What do I pay attention to? The qualitative impacts of my writing. Comments. Replies. Emails. Other bloggers who discuss it, or discussions on Metafilter, Slashdot, Reddit and Hacker News. That stuff matters to me a lot because I write for two reasons, which are, in order: to work out my own thinking, and; to influence other peoples’ thinking.
Writing is a cognitive prosthesis for me. Working things out on the page helps me work things out in my life. And, of course, working things out on the page helps me work more things out on the page. Writing begets writing:
Honestly, that is sufficient. Not in the sense that writing, without being read, would make me happy or fulfilled. Being read and being part of a community and a conversation matters a lot to me. But the very act of writing is so important to me that even if no one read me, I would still write.
This is a thing that writers aren’t supposed to admit. As I wrote on this blog’s fourth anniversary, the most laughably false statement about writing ever uttered is Samuel Johnson’s notorious “No man but a blockhead ever wrote but for money”:
Making art is not an “economically rational” activity. Neither is attempting to persuade other people to your point of view. These activities are not merely intrinsically satisfying, they are also necessary, at least for many of us. The long, stupid fight about copyright that started in the Napster era has rarely acknowledged this, nor has it grappled with the implications of it. On the one hand, you have copyright maximalists who say totally absurd things like, “If you don’t pay for art, no one will make art, and art will disappear.” This is one of those radioactively false statements whose falsity is so glaring that it can be seen from orbit.
But on the other hand, you know who knows this fact very well? The corporations that pay creative workers. Movie studios, record labels, publishers, games studios: they all know that they are in possession of a workforce that has to make art, and will continue to do so, paycheck or not, until someone pokes their eyes out or breaks their fingers. People make art because it matters to them, and this trait makes workers terribly exploitable. As Fobazi Ettarh writes in her seminal paper on “vocational awe,” workers who care about their jobs are at a huge disadvantage in labor markets. Teachers, librarians, nurses, and yes, artists, are all motivated by a sense of mission that often trumps their own self-interest and well-being and their bosses know it:
One of the most important ideas in David Graeber’s magisterial book Bullshit Jobs is that the ground state of labor is to do a job that you are proud of and that matters to you, but late-stage capitalist alienation has gotten so grotesque that some people will actually sneer at the idea that, say, teachers should be well compensated: “Why should you get a living wage – isn’t the satisfaction of helping children payment enough?”
These are the most salient facts of the copyright fight: creativity is a non-economic activity, and this makes creative workers extremely vulnerable to exploitation. People make art because they have to. As Marx was finishing Kapital, he was often stuck working from home, having pawned his trousers so he could keep writing. The fact that artists don’t respond rationally to economic incentives doesn’t mean they should starve to death. Art – like nursing, teaching and librarianship – is necessary for human thriving.
No, the implication of the economic irrationality of vocational awe is this: the only tool that can secure economic justice for workers who truly can’t help but do their jobs is solidarity. Creative workers need to be in solidarity with one another, and with our audiences – and, often, with the other workers at the corporations who bring our work to market. We are all class allies locked in struggle with the owners of both the entertainment companies and the technology companies that sit between us and our audiences (this is the thesis of Rebecca Giblin’s and my 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism):
The idea of artistic solidarity is an old and important one. Victor Hugo, creator of the first copyright treaty – the Berne Convention – wrote movingly about how the point of securing rights for creators wasn’t to allow their biological children to exploit their work after their death, but rather, to ensure that the creative successors of artists could build on their forebears’ accomplishments. Hugo – like any other artist who has a shred of honesty and has thought about the subject for more than ten seconds – knew that he was part of a creative community and tradition, one composed of readers and writers and critics and publishing workers, and that this was a community and a tradition worth fighting for and protecting.
It was Christmas Eve, babe, In the fish tank. A crayfish said to me, won’t see another one. And then he sang a song, ‘The Old Bay Seasoning”. I dreamed of the beach, babe, And got to reasoning.
I’m gonna have some fun ‘Cos I’m the lucky one. I’m the last in this line And near the water. ‘Cos “Happy Christmas” Means lots of greeting, And lots more eating, So for us it just means slaughter.
If I walk like a man And carry a fan, Then I can stay cool Between surf-line and pool. 'Cos if I get spotted Too far up the shore, It’s only drawn butter That’s waiting for me.
You were red! I was blue, I looked nothing like you! I got out of the water Before it was hot. The chef’s knife was swinging, The hash it was slinging, So we nipped round a corner And into the night.
Now the lads who go out fishing With their nets in Galway Bay Have all returned to port For Christmas Day.
You’re a shrimp! You’re a wimp! You’ll evolve to a chimp, Lying there like a crab or a cod on a slab! You look like an oyster! You couldn’t be moister If it rained all the way from your face to your arse!
But the lads who do the fishing From those boats on Galway Bay Have docked beside the pier On Christmas Day.
You could be quite a dish, But so would any fish, With lots of flavoured creams Piped all around you. I’d rather swim, babe, Deep in the sea, babe, Just you and me, babe, We’ll keep well clear of Mayo.
And the lads who’d be out fishing In their boats on Galway Bay Are at home and getting drunk This Christmas Day.
Here’s the original - warning, contains Language, Imagery, Poetry, Emotion, Adversity, Despair, Hope, Love, Implied Smoking and Artistic Monochrome.
Nollaig Shona daoibh, or the Winter Festival Of Your Preference.
There’s nothing like the joy of capturing those treasured Christmas moments on film for all eternity, only to find that you’ve cropped the kids’ heads off, left the lens cap on, and forgot to load the camera with film in the first place. Krapshoot can’t fix your incompetence, but they can at least make it easier to screw up your snaps.
This year’s ad is a send-up of a Kodak ad from 1960, and a company that I’ve been wanting to parody for several years now. I studied photography in high school, and have had an interest in cameras ever since. Kodak seemed a natural target for the annual Christmas ad, but I hadn’t been able to do a parody of them for two reasons.
Normally, I have trouble finding a suitable ad, but this time, I had several potential candidates to choose from; all of them were ideal for editing, but I could only pick one. The other issue was finding a suitable name, something which I’d struggled with. The idea for Krapshoot finally came to me recently, as did the “Return me first!” line. When I look at an ad and instantly think of a parody headline, I know that’s the one to go with.
Hopefully, you won’t find any Krapshoot gear under your tree this year. If you do, contact your local bomb disposal team at once.
Social Security and Medicare are paid for, week by week, through payroll contributions.
Elon and Vivek want to steal your contributions.
Americans should be united in fighting for Social Security and Medicare increases.
Republican voters would accept a worse retirement delivered by House Republicans, then focus all their anger on distractions provided by politicians and media.
It is a sick cycle proven to crush the soul of America.
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