January 26, 2010

“Free,” as in Freelance

The Los Angeles Times recently published an article that might qualify as the most unscoop-worthy story so far of the barely birthed decade.  Its finding: Freelance writers are underpaid!

Actually, to be fair to the author, James Rainey, his point was a bit more nuanced.  The fees commonly paid to freelance writers working in both traditional and digital media have cratered dramatically over the past decade, he notes, as publishers have watched their own revenues plummet under the combined weight of the Great Recession and the secular shift from dead-trees to digital media, with its far-less rumunerative ad rates.

“What’s sailing away, a decade into the 21st Century, is the common conception that writing is a profession—or at least a skilled craft that should come not only with psychic rewards but with something resembling a living wage,” Rainey writes.

You can read the entire article here.

(And while you’re at it, can someone please explain to me—with a straight face—how Arianna Huffington can be acclaimed as a savior of Journalism based on The Huffington Post’s business model of not paying journalists?)

Of course, writers with marquee names will always be able to name their own price.  But for everyone else, it’s getting tougher to find honest work that will pay the bills. (Don’t ask me how I know.)

Rainey points to freelance writing jobs posted on Craigslist, offering Web-writing assignments paying $15 to $30.  That’s a pittance, surely, but hardly the most egregious examples I can find.  Indeed, an increasing number of Web publishers have embraced the attitude that writers’ work is to be compensated at rates less than the going price of a frappucino. (That’s a small frappuccino, by the way.)

On Freelancer.com, an online exchange where Web publishers place writing assignments up for bid, there’s no shortage of work—as long as you’re willing to churn out a four- or five-hundred words for no more than $1.50.  Per article.

Yes, per article.  Really.

To cite a few random examples of the writing jobs proffered on Freelancer.com:

“I need 20 original articles between 300 and 500 words about nail fungus (toenail fungus and fingernail fungus) which must be completed within 5 days. I will provide the titles for all the articles. My max budget for this project is $85.”

I will abstain from opining what a fair rate for writing 6,000 to 10,000 words about nail fungus, but I’m pretty sure that it’s more than $85. (In fact, I’m pretty sure that writing 20 original articles in five days about nail fungus is prohibited under the UN Convention Against Torture.)

Here’s another one:

“We have an online casino guide with over 200 listings. We need copywriters to visit specific casinos and

1. Write a 2-300 word unique description of the casino

2. Fill out a spreadsheet of fields with information available on each casino site (owner/contact email etc.)

We will pay $3 per completed casino according to our requirements.”

To recap, they want some poor hack to get in his car, drive to a specific casino, inspect it and take notes, and then write an enticing blurb about the joint—for a fee that barely covers the price of a gallon of non-leaded?  I do hope it’s close-by.

And lastly:

“My company is looking for 75 articles to be used for building links for article marketing. They will be used towards increasing the site’s search engine ranking.

Our client has a website based on “how to save money during a recession”, so any content that would be relevant is what we are looking for. It will be the writers [sic] responsibility to provide the following:

  • average article expected to be at least 300 words
  • SEO Friendly titles
  • of high quality

Our budget is not to exceed $300 for this project.

Paying $4 for each finished 300-word piece makes this one of the better paying jobs I turned up on Freelancer.com.

There are a couple of factors at work here, I believe:

1. Words, Schmerds. One of paradoxes of the Internet is that while we’re continually remind that Content is King (Gag!), nobody wants to pay for it online. That now includes publishers as well as Web users.  Sure, these stingy bastards putting assignments up for bid on Freelancer.com will probably receive drek for their few shekels invested, but my hunch is the quality of the work received is irrelevant.  Good, bad or mediocre, it’s all the same: the only thing these Web publishers care about is obtaining prose-by-the-pound that they can then sell oodles of Google ads around, as the reference to “SEO [Search-Engine Optimized] Friendly” titles in the third item makes clear.

2. Globalization Hits the Scribbling Class. Even if you write as fast as Stephen King and are as prolific as James Patterson, there’s no way anyone can financially support themselves working at such appalling, subterranean freelance rates. Not even if you live in the middle of Nebraska.  These payment rates are at Third-World piecework levels.

In fact, I’m willing to wager that many of the “writers” bidding on these assignments reside in places closer to Mumbai than Manhattan, Miami or Minneapolis.  A quick perusal of Freelancer.com reveals eager bids received from “Israr,” “Faruk Ahmed,” “Baijnath Kumar” (“Hello Sir I have 3 excellent article writter [sic] which can write high quality within minutes, so please consider me for this job,” he pleads), “Praveen,” and “Rama.”

I’ve personally espoused the benefits of free trade for years, but I get a lump in my throat now that my own livelihood is threatened as a result. Writers are now learning a bitter lesson that U.S. factory workers were forced to swallow a couple of decades ago: their jobs can be shipped overseas to a low-wage country and there’s not much they can do about it. Sure, the final product might not be much good, but it will be good enough to sell ads around.

After all, it’s just words.

Update 2/1/2010: Here’s an allied take on the issue from  Alan Mutter, who writes the always interesting “Reflections of a Newsosaur.”

Update 2/8/2010: The New York Times’ David Carr examines the cheap-and-ubiquitous-content business model exemplified by Demand Media.

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , ,

December 30, 2009

Those Not-So-Obscure Objects of Desire

For the second time in a decade, The New York Times is on a tear to uncover the hidden dangers of WMDs.

No, this time the subject is not Saddam’s non-existent nukes, but the dire threat posed by the widgets of mass distraction (WMD) that permeate every nook and cranny of our life: text-enabled cell phones and smart phones.

Since last July, The Times has published at least 21 articles on the hazards and potentially deadly consequences of drivers talking and texting while behind the wheel as part of its series “Driven to Distraction.” For an institution challenged to maintain its reputation as the paper of record in face of unremitting downsizing and layoffs, the series is exhaustive and exhausting in its thoroughness as it apportions culpability all around.

It blames the cell phone industry for irresponsibly promoting its devices as way to turn idle drive-time into productive work-time despite knowledge of the risks; attention-deficited, multi-tasking drivers who focus their attention everywhere but on the road in front of them; and lackadaisical state lawmakers who have refused to take the problem seriously. (The Times cites one federal study that found that 11 percent of all drivers were yakking on their cell phone at any particular time. Only 11 percent? Based upon my extensive driving experience in New York, where nearly every-other driver seems to have a phone surgically stapled to their ear, that’s the most egregious undercount since Bush vs. Gore.)

I initially felt that that The Times was intentionally over blowing the issue to some degree. (An acquaintance, a former Times-person for three decades, recently told me that the editors were pinning some of their 2009 Pulitzer aspirations upon the series.) One of my old colleagues from Newsweek speculated that one of the top editors at The Times must have been rear-ended by a distracted, teenaged texter recently and decided to do something about it.

But the more I mull it over, I’m increasingly convinced they’re underestimating the dimensions of the problem.  And it’s not just the multitudes preoccupied by their iPhone while driving.

Truth is, the epidemic of mass distraction is more prevalent—and perilous—than the H1N1 virus. We’ve become a society of gadget-fixated obsessives, glamoured by the latest the shiny personal electronic device of the moment. Whenever I’ve ventured into Manhattan recently I’ve been astounded by the high proportion of multi-tasking pedestrians ambling down the sidewalks with their eyes glued to their phones, fingers flailing furiously over their tiny keyboards as they urgently tap, tap, tap away. Or they’ll walk with the head bent over a cramped, two-inch screen attempting to read something, utterly oblivious to the bustle about them as they clutch their smartphones like talismans: Yea, thought I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will see no evil, for my iPhone and Blackberry they comfort me.

Tales of ridiculous, avoidable accidents that have befallen distracted cell-yakkers and -texters have spawned a new category of urban cautionary tales, such as the Staten Island girl who was so engrossed texting a friend that she walked into an open manhole in her path. While she escaped with only a few bruises (and the uncomfortable knowledge that she came close to winning a Darwin Award), not every preoccupied pedestrian is quite so lucky.

One company sees an opportunity for a technological solution—an app called Type n Walk that harnesses the built-in camera to display a live image of the street directly ahead to your phone screen as you text.

Excuse me, but what’s wrong with this picture?!

The paradox inherent in modern communications technology is that while it connects us to almost anyone in the world in real time, it also tends to isolate us from our actual physical environment and leave us suspended in a virtual electronic bubble of our own making and oblivious to the larger world around us.

Caveat textor.

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

August 14, 2009

Butch Cassidy and the Head-in-the-Sand Gang

The raucous free-for-alls playing across the country at various town hall meetings focusing on health care reform reminds me of one of my favorite movies, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

No, this is not because Arlen Specter somehow reminds me of Paul Newman.

In the film, you might recall, Butch and Sundance make their fateful decision to go to Bolivia after they are pursued across much of the scenic Southwest by the unrelenting and implacable super posse dispatched by E.H. Harriman to stop their train-robbing ways.  The pair ride and ride, desperately trying to lose their dogged pursuers, but every time they look over their shoulders their unshakeable foes are still there, relentlessly hounding them.

 “Who are those guys?” Butch and Sundance repeatedly ask each other, with a mounting mixture of frustration and wonderment.

 That’s what I keep asking myself about the foaming, splenetic protesters who have turned out at various congressional events to vent their screeching, splenetic  opposition to Obama’s proposed health care reforms.  “Who are those guys?”

I mean, who in their right mind is satisfied with our current undeniably broken and unsatisfactory health care system, which leaves millions of Americans unprotected, and those of us who are lucky enough to have health insurance paying ever-escalating premiums for ever-diminishing coverage?  (Other than the insurance companies, of course, and those who carry water for them.) 

Granted, we’ve learned that these shout-fests, far from being spontaneous groundswells, are well-organized and orchestrated by various factions opposed to all aspects of Obama’s political agenda, such as the self-styled Tea-Party Patriots anti-government-spending zealots.  And some of the putative “just a mom from a few blocks away” have been revealed to be Republican operatives and party hacks. (Paul Krugman, as usual, has written one of his typically smart columns today, pointing out that even “moderate” Republicans like Chuck Grassley have embraced their party’s latest ridiculous lie, that Obama’s health-care proposals would establish “death panels” and advocate euthanasia of the elderly.)

Okay, if we’ve learned anything from the past eight years, it’s to expect a little—okay, make that a lot—of dissembling from the foes of social progress.  But what really concerns me is the ranting, raving, and rebuking rank-and-file.  Where did all of these desperate and angry and (let’s be honest) pale white people come from?

Are they so buffeted, depressed, or displaced by all of the soul-shaking events of the past decade—two recessions; terrorist attacks; two simultaneous, hard-to-comprehend wars in far-off, little-understood countries; an unprecedented financial crisis, all set off against a backdrop of growing economic inequality and uncertainty—that they have independently and collectively decided they are (in the memorable phrase uttered by Howard Beale in “Network”) “mad as hell and not going to take it any more.”  Even if the proposed reforms would probably make their own lives less stressful, more secure, and healthier?  (The irony, of course, is that for all their verbalized fears that Obama is a secret Socialist, in a truly social democratic society most of these people would find themselves with fewer economic insecurities.)  

Are they that fearful of change that they’re willing to fight—even threaten violence—to retain our current sick health care system?

Who are those guys?

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

August 4, 2009

Opening the Midden Box

I spent many hours this past weekend delving, with the help of my Spousal Unit (SU), into a couple of big cardboard cartons filled with old family photos and documents that I inherited some years ago from my mother.

 When I say “old,” I mean “about a decade-older-than-ancient,” at least by contemporary standards.  On my mother’s-mother’s-mother’s side of my family (got that?) I am descended from German/Alsatian Jews who arrived in America a few decades before the Civil War and settled in Louisville, Kentucky, and later Nashville, Tennessee.  Thanks to a family tree compiled years ago by my first cousin, Anne Goldgar, (now a professor of history at the King’s College, London), I can trace part of my mother’s family back to my great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Abraham Lieberman, born in 1774 in Brishberg, Bavaria; died in Louisville in 1885.

And I can tell you with some confidence that, since well before that time, nobody on that side of  my family has ever thrown anything remotely significant away.  (Admittedly, this now seems like a good thing.)  Here are a few of the things we discovered in the midden boxes:

  • Many newspaper clippings, some dating back to 1930, reporting various family engagements, weddings, births, and deaths
  • A large photographic portrait of my grandmother (born 1896) as an infant
  • A photograph of my grandfather with his high school class, about 1910
  • Various formal portraits of my great-grandmother Corrinne (born 1866) and great-grandfather Charles (ditto)
  • Copy of a formal proclamation praising of the contribution to the local school board of my great-grandmother, who was a mover in Nashville civic circles until her death in 1928 (there was a high school there named after her)
  • Photographs of my great-great grandmother (born 1844)-and-father (born 1842), dating from shortly after the Civil War.
  • The ketuba or wedding contract from their wedding, dated October 14, 1863

Truthfully, reviewing this stuff, handling a 145-year old piece of paper covered with neat Hebrew printing, looking at faded but still-legible photographs labeled on the back in my grandmother’s wriggly handwriting, I felt an overwhelming sense of connection to my family.  I was very aware that all these things had been literally passed from hand-to-hand-to-hand-to-hand for generations, until they came into my own.

These irreplaceable artifacts are all printed on that most archaic and retrograde of media, paper.  And while many of the newspaper clippings are yellowed and a little flakey, most of the material is in surprisingly good condition.  The ketuba, despite being lettered by hand, was perfectly legible (good penmanship was something to be proud of in those days); it looked closer to 15 years old than 150.

I wonder if any of the digital record that we produce in the course of our daily lives today will be as legible and readily accessible to our descendants, say, 150 years hence?  Unlikely, me thinks.

In fact, my house is filled now with all sorts of electronic media and devices that I can’t even access anymore.  I have boxes of VHS tapes that I suppose we could still watch—if I still had the VCR hooked up.  The visual record of our trip to China to adopt our daughter back in 1996 resides on a proprietary Sanyo Camcorder cartridge that we have no way of watching since the camcorder itself kicked the bucket (shortly after its warranty expired, natch).

While CDs and DVDs were both claimed to be archival when they were first rolled out to consumers, anyone with a small child in the house knows that all it really takes to render them incomprehensible and useless is one good scratch.  (Another good reason to hang on to my vinyl copy of Saxophone Colossus.) The information stored on USB-flash drives is said to be good for years; we’ll see.

I can no longer even read the original digital versions of many things I produced myself.  For years I kept the floppy disks containing the manuscripts and notes for all of the magazine articles I wrote when I was just starting out, back in the early 80s.  I had boxes of old 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppies, filled with files written with WordStar (an early word-processing program that someone once aptly described as so user-unfriendly, “it was like waltzing with a refrigerator”.)

But every time I traded up my computer system—from CP/M to DOS to Windows 3.0 to Windows 95, etc., to the present Apple OS X 10.5—my technical capability to read the information on those disks receded further, just beyond my reach,  into the ungraspable past.  New hardware and software may be labelled “backwards compatible” for a few years, but inevitably the window is closed shut, and older formats and systems are eventually orphaned and abandoned—rendering their information all but irretrievable.  When was the last time you saw a computer with a built-in 5.25-inch floppy-disk drive? Probably while George H. W. Bush was still in the White House. 

Finally, I realized that with no computer that could read my old floppies, they were about as decipherable as Linear B and I tossed them all out.

Sic transit C:\>. Chalk up one advantage for dead trees.

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as

July 31, 2009

What’s Black and White and Lightly Carbonated?

obama_beerYesterday’s “Beer Summit” adds a whole new dimension to the term personal diplomacy.  Actually, I thought Barack Obama, as usual, played it just right, telling the press “This is not a summit, guys.  This is three folks having a drink at the end of the day and hopefully giving people an opportunity to listen to each other.”  I’ll sip a beer anytime that it promotes and encourages social civility, dialogue, and cooler heads prevailing.

 The more I learn about that unfortunate front-porch incident and the background of Gates and Crowley, the more I’m convinced that they’re both decent, well-meaning men.  My guess is each copped an attitude with the other, tempers flared, and neither one was willing to back down and walk away when their encounter reached the flash-over point.  (Neither Cambridge cops nor Harvard professors are known to the world at large for their humility.) 

And in that case, it’s never, ever the police officer involved that ends up sitting in the backseat of the patrol car.  (Geeze, I think I was about seven-years old when I leaned that you don’t say anything to tick off a cop, on duty or off.  Isn’t that common sense?)

My one complaint about the Beer Summit, er, I mean, White House Happy Hour?

What’s Obama doing drinking Bud Light?

Mr. President, please, that is such a wimpy excuse for beer!  It’s training beer!  It’s water pretending to be beer when it grows up!  It’s the brewer’s equivalent of a typical politician’s stump speech:  focus-group tested, commoditized, homogenized, manufactured, and lacking any art,  depth, bite or satisfying, lingering aftertaste.  So unlike you!

I would have imagined that a man of your manifest sophistication and erudition—the best public speaker to have inhabited the White House in decades—would have rewarded your gold-plated throat and vocal cords with something better: maybe a hoppy, thirst-quenching IPA (I’m become very partial to that produced under the Long Hammer brand), or considering the summertime heat of the capital, a refreshing, cool hefenweizen. (Check out Harpoon’s UFO brew: Wunderbar!)

Then again, considering the barrage of polical flak directed at Obama a few months back from various right-wing cable talkers and other untethered nut-jobs for simply ordering a burger with dijon mustard, perhaps the astute maneuver was to stay away from elitist micro-breweries or foreign brands and stick with something middle-of-the-road and tasteless, but politically palatable.

I can almost hear Rush Limbaugh:  “In yet another sign betraying his true ultra-left leanings, Barack Obama drank a bottle of Stella—a beer produced in Belgium under a European-style, socialist regime that does not believe in giving their citizens the chance to choose their own personal physician—at yesterday’s Beer Summit.  Meanwhile, hundreds of patriotic American brewery workers are in danger of losing their jobs to foreign competition…..

I think I need a beer.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , ,

July 30, 2009

Facebook is Creeping Me Out, A Little

There’s something about Facebook that I can’t figure out.  Maybe you can help. scared

Background: I’ve been on FB for about a year or so.  I’m a pretty selective user, that is I don’t “friend” everybody and anybody that I might have shared a cup of coffee with since I was six-years old—the type of user I call a “Facebook slut” who promiscuously  links to hundreds of others.  (Hey, if the shoe fits….)  I’m linked to about 50 or so people, mainly old friends from high school and college, and a few former professional colleagues.

Recently, however, Facebook has suggested that I “friend”—I’ll never get used to using that as a verb—some people who are new acquaintances.  And what’s puzzling me is that these are individuals who I’ve been introduced to in a strictly professional context, and there are no pre-existing social webs between us that I’m aware of.

My question: How does Facebook know that I know these people? 

Of course, at its techno-heart, social-networking websites such as Facebook and Linkedin are just extraordinarily powerful relational databases.  That’s how they can recognise and suggest other people that you might know.  If you’re a friend of John, and John is a friend of Mary, it’s a pretty short logical leap to suggest that you might be a friend of Mary’s, too.

Likewise, if I graduated from Kegger U. back in 1979 (the parties! You wouldn’t believe!), and you attended dear old K.U.  at the same time, there’s a good chance we might know each other. (Whether we can remember anything is a different question.)  All Facebook’s computers have to do is seek those similiarities and match us up.  It’s the same for jobs—look for people who toiled, say, at Superior Frostbite Technologies, Inc., at the same time and then suggest they link to each other.

But let’s look at these two new acquainteances that Facebook has proposed to me. We have no shared educational experiences, work histories, or social overlaps that I’m aware of: 

  • Person No 1 is a real-estate agent who lives 100 miles from me, in northwest Connecticut.  Late autumn, I contacted her to explore the possibility of purchasing a plot of land adjacent to a summer cabin I own there.  We have since spoken on the phone maybe a half-dozen times and exchanged  less than a dozen emails.  (Nothing ever came of my real estate bid, btw). In fact, I have never met this woman face-to-face and I’m unaware of any mutual friends or acquaintances.  She happens to have a rather unusual last name, however, and earlier this year, Facebook plucked her from the 3.5 million people who live in Connecticut and popped her name up on my screen.
  • Person No. 2 works at a non-profit organization in New York where I have been doing some pro bono work since April.  Since then, I’ve emailed him a couple of times week to let him know when I’ll coming into the office.  No other social/professional cross-over that I’m aware of.  Yet somehow Facebook has pulled him from its ranks of 200 million registered users as being “friend-worthy”.

 What flummoxes me is how the hell does Facebook know of my connection to these people?  

 I can think of three possible explanations:

  1. This is an ultimate case of six-degrees of separation and there are deep, hidden connections that I am unaware of but that Facebook’s all-powerful Brainiac-like digital cortex can easily discern.  (Why, your great-great uncle Albert is a dead ringer for the no-good ice man who ran away with my second-cousin, once-removed, Bertha, who later was lost on the  Carpathia in 1918.  Wait a minute!….)
     
  2. Pure chance.  Call this the Rick Blaine explanation: “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.” Possible, but unlikely outside of Casablanca. 
     
  3. Somehow Facebook is reading my email, or has gained access to the address book located on my home iMac.

Explanation No. 3 is not impossible.  Indeed, a few months ago I downloaded a piece of third-party software that allowed me to download my friends’ Facebook profile pictures to my iMac address book and trusty Palm PDA. (Yeah, at my advance age I often forget what my friends look like.)  I was unaware of granting any license, however, to Facebook to record on its servers the contents of my personal contacts list and use it for it for FB purposes.

But that’s the only plausible explanation I can think of.  And if it’s true, I think it qualifies as a significant invasion of privacy. 

Does anybody out there have any other ideas?  I’d love to hear ‘em. 

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as ,

July 29, 2009

Things I’ve Learned From The Great Recession

gd49Like too-many millions of other Americans, my family and I have experienced the financial crisis as something more real than merely a cascade of gloomy newspaper headlines. My job was eliminated last year a few days before Thanksgiving, and the months since have been a slow, disillusioning slog, hunting scarce jobs as the economy wobbled and dipped, like a child’s gyroscope winding down.

Thankfully, my own sentence to downsized limbo now looks to be ending.  Here’s what I’ve learned during the last eight months:

  1.  If you have a job presently, make sure you back up important examples of your work—the stuff you’re proudest of—onto your personal flash drive frequently.  I can’t say this too much: back up, back up, back up!  These days, when the ax falls, it falls quickly and unmercifully, and you could find yourself forever locked out of your office computer and bounced to the pavement, without any chance to grab examples of the work you did for your now-former employer.  (This didn’t happen to me, but to my former boss.  It wasn’t pretty.)
     
  2. If you get the chop, it’s okay to be upset, but be civil and professional toward the HR apparatchik who delivers the bad news. It’s not personal.  As Tessio says in The Godfather, “Tell Mike it was only business, I always liked him.”  Staying on HR’s good side is important: They’ll be much more likely to grant you small favors while you negotiate your severance if you don’t act like a jerk.
     
  3.  As soon as you hit the street, get some new business cards reflecting your new independent-contractor status.  Nothing expensive or fancy, just something to remind people how to reach you. Check out Vistaprint.com.
     
  4. Don’t bother applying for any job advertised on Craigslist.  Your chance of getting a response from a prospective employer is considerably less than the odds of spotting Pope Benedict XVI getting the special lap dance at Scores on Easter Sunday.  Don’t waste your time.
     
  5. Likewise, ignore premium job sites like TheLadders.com that require you to pay up-front  to see their listings, as well as services that offer to shoot your resume out to hundreds of headhunters for a fee.   Zero results: Not worth it.  Husband your cash. 
     
  6. The Web is fueling a race to the bottom when it comes to freelance fees.  One Utah-based outfit contacted me about writing Websites for small businesses.  The pay: $.03 per word.  That’s right: three pennies! (I declined their munificent offer.)
     
  7. If you’re a finalist for a job and you don’t grab the brass ring, be gracious, positive, and thank the hiring manager for the opportunity.  Express interest in any future positions that might open up, and then stay in touch.  If their first choice doesn’t work out, they might come back to you quickly without restarting the interview process.  This actually happened to me.
     
  8. It’s true: Wine will get you through times of no job, better than a job will get you through times of no wine.  ‘Nuff said.
     

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as ,

July 27, 2009

Do Not Fold, Kindle, or Mutilate

 

Even if they are, he'll do okay

But do you trust him?

There’s an interesting summation in The New York Times today of the brouhaha over Amazon.com’s ill-advised kindlelostomy. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)  I won’t replay the whole megillah here, only to say that it seems that Amazon.com decided it possessed the rights to sell the e-book of George Orwell’s 1984 (one of my favorite novels, by the way); then decided it didn’t; and to make everything all better somebody at Amazon decided that the smartest thing to do would be to unilaterally and remotely erase all of the offending, illicit 1984 copies from the Kindles of everyone who had shelled out $9.99 for one.

 Jeff Bezos has already apologized to the wronged Kindleteers and admitted that Amazon’s solution was “stupid.”  But the episode highlights ones one of the defining characteristics of digital content (how I hate that word, but we’ll let that pass for now).

 Old Media, whatever its flaws and drawbacks, is immutable.  When you buy a dead-trees book, newspaper, magazine or even a (dead-plastic?) DVD, you get to keep it.  It’s yours.  Forever.  The yellowed, much-thumbed paperback of 1984 that lingers on my bookshelf will always read, line by line, exactly the same way. (As a fan of all things Orwell, I say thank God for that.)  Short of breaking into my home, no miscreant can take it away.  That’s why it’s called a hard copy.

Digital media, on the other hand, not so much.  It’s much more than soft—it’s as stretchable, twistable, and mutable as Silly Putty.  That’s a great part of its appeal. Nothing is set in stone.  In fact, there’s no stone.

I can confidently predict that we’ll see more episodes like Kindlegate in the future, whether at the hands of big e-tailers needing to move more inventory, or rogue hackers looking to cause a bit of mischief, Digital Rights Management or no.  For if we’ve learned anything since the dawn of the Internet Era it is that any digital device can be—and eventually will be—hacked by someone determined enough to do so.

 As publishers migrate to e-books exclusively, what’s to prevent some ticked-off hacker from erasing entire libraries, whether personal or institutional, with a few deft clicks of his mouse?  Just to prove they can.  Or a digital publisher from forcing the owners of a certain e-book to replace their old, worn copies with a newer, authorized version of the same title?  (Not so outlandish a scenario, if you’ve been following Scribner’s decision to reissue Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in a new edition that portrays Papa’s second wife more sympathetically.)

Other, more sinister possibilities loom.  What’s to stop some interested party from hacking in to an e-book so as to change the work’s ultimate meaning and significance altogether?  This is not as far-fetched as it first sounds:  Entries in open-source encyclopedias like Wikipedia are frequently edited and redacted by those sharpening their personal ideological hatchets to reflect the facts as they see them.

Might someone tweak Uncle Tom’s Cabin just enough to portray slavery as a beneficent-but-misunderstood institution?  And Simon Legree as a struggling, well-intended entrepreneur, desperate to provide needed jobs to his beloved community, but forced to contend with unreasonable, unmanageable employees.

That would be the David Duke edition. 

Or maybe make sufficient changes to 1984 to flip Orwell’s distopian satire of Stalinism on its back and transform it into a parable emphasizing the need for a resolute, unflinching, do-whatever-it-takes chief executive to rule a country at war.

That would the Dick Cheney edition, soon to be sold from an undisclosed location.

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

July 26, 2009

A Close Encounter With the WABM

A true story:  

 It is 1978.  I am 22 year old, standing on lower Sixth Avenue, under the marquee of the Waverly Theater, waiting for a friend.  It is July: the muggy air feels like a damp quilt hanging on my shoulders.  New York City is tense, still reeling from the recent financial crisis and the looting during the Great Black Out the summer before.  Black-white relations are bad and on everyone’s mind. 

 (Basically, all you really need to know is that Jimmy Carter is in the White House, and everybody believes things suck.) 

So, I’m standing on the street, minding my own business, wearing (if I recall correctly) the plaid sports jacket my father bought me when I went off to college.  I am truly a whiter shade of pale.  I hear him when he’s still a hundred yards distant:

 The World’s Angriest Black Man.

A block away, walking toward me on the sidewalk, is a black guy in his mid-20s, wearing a white dashiki, skullcap, and jeans. Not big, not tall, he is extremely wiry and muscled.  He has a wispy beard and feverish eyes and he is carrying on a high-decibel, furious monologue with a friend, gesticulating broadly.  I have never seen anyone so amped up in my life.

 “….So this motherfucker pulls a knife on me! And I tell him, ‘Asshole, whaddya think you’re doin’ wid that?”…

There are other people on the sidewalk and his effect on everyone is electrifying. Palpable tension shoots through the crowd as fast as a window pane cracks.

 “….So I pull out my own knife then, and I look that asshole in the eye, and I say to him, I gonna cut you first!..

It’s like a moment in a bad spaghetti-western, when the meanest, most ornery outlaw west of the Perdenales rides into town, and all the law-abiding, upstanding townspeople scurry to seek cover.

“….Then, I start chasing that motherfucker down street screaming,’ I’m gonna kill you!…

The World’s Angriest Black Man is striding closer.  I’m right in his path.  A horrible, heart-rendering collision is inevitable.  It’s like 60 seconds before the Titanic hits the fateful ice berg—except in this case the ice berg stands six-feet tall, weights barely 135 pounds, and hasn’t been in a fight since sixth grade.  And the Titanic could really, really use a Valium or two.

“….So he takes off and I take off and I’m running as fast as I can and I’m close to gettin’ him…

I try to stay cool.  I mean cool.  Hey, I say to myself, I know who Amiri Baraka is! I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X!  Twice!  I own a bunch of classic Miles Davis records!  I read Newsweek every week!

“….And then I take hold of my knife!…

The World’s Angriest Black Man is mere feet away.  He sees me.  I’m face-to-face with distilled nitro glycerin in human form.  One false move, and the WABM will go off on me.

“….And then can you believe what the mofo tries to do!…

Now the World’s Angriest Black Man is right in front of me.  Our eyes meet.  I can’t look away. And abruptly, like a shift in the wind, his voice changes.  It’s no longer the furious voice straight off Cathedral Parkway, but resonates of the Upper East Side.  

“Actually,” he says to me in a placid, self-assured tone, “I’m really passive.”

Leave a Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , ,

July 25, 2009

More Truthiness From the Folks at Fox

logo_foxBizThe wonderful marketing wizards at New Corp. at are it again.

Have your heard the new slogan for the Fox Business Network?  Fighting For You!

Yeah, they’re fighting for us—me, you, all the little people, and  Joe the Plumber (especially Joe the Plumber)—every blessed minute of the day over there at the FBN 24-hour business-oriented cable news channel.  Suddenly, I feel safe and secure, just like I did sipping Ovaltine back in my grandmother’s kitchen.

 Thank you, Fox Business Network, for manning the barricades and putting up your dukes on my behalf!  I slept sounder last night than I have in years.

I have just one question: Whom, exactly, are you fighting?

A digression: While I’m no fan of Rupert Murdoch’s nominal politics (he’s not so much a fire-in-the-belly conservative as much as a money-in-the-bank opportunist), I’ve always harbored a guilty admiration for this audaciousness, his ability to pivot on a farthing, and lack of any core principles.  (Some of you may recall that some years back this champion of freedom caved in to Beijing’s demands that the remove the BBC international service from his Star TV beamed into China.) 

And then there’s that “We Report, You Decide” mind-wash blared endlessly by Murdoch’s flagship Fox News Channel, which, in its sheer ridiculousness and total, utterly straight-faced disregard for what we call on my planet “reality,” should be chiseled on the façade of 1984’s Ministry of Truth.  It’s a perfect example of the Big Lie:  Repeat something often enough, loud enough, for long enough, and a certain percentage of the population will believe you, even if monkeys don’t really fly out your butt.

But back to Fox Business Network, which, while I’ve been jotting this post for the past 20 minutes has not relaxed its meaty, sledge hammer-like fists even to quickly scratch its nose, because it’s perpetually on guard, bouncing on its toes, getting off a few good jabs when it sees an opening—There’s a left! And a right! And another left!—and fighting for you and me!

I ask again, just whom is it fighting?  General Electric?  General Motors?  Con-Agra?  Microsoft?  The U.S. Treasury?  The Dow Jones Industrial Average? Or, maybe, the entire S&P 500? (Is that a fair fight, I mean, really?)  Is Murdoch, one of our era’s most successful practitioners of ravenous, gloves-off capitalism really turning on his fellow corporate titans?

Or maybe it’s a clever (?) attempt by Murdoch’s marketing lieutenants to tap into and ally Fox with the resurgent sense of populism and demands for a more equitable democracy that seems to be gathering steam (I hope) under Obama. 

 Sorry, America, for doing so much to foist that phony Iraqi war off on you a few years back, but now we’ve seen the light. And we’re fighting for you!

Trying to suss out what this marketing bilge is supposed to mean makes my middle-aged teeth ache and my gums bleed.  I’ll tell you what:

I’ll report and you decide.

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , ,