Getting everything for free is a bad idea. Paying for things you want today encourages the development of new things in the future.
It’s not that I like to demonstrate failure, but I'm about to lose an intellectual argument right before your eyes.
Here goes:
Everything is free. Creative works of wide and motley kinds may sometimes earn their creators financial rewards of various dimensions, but those days are disappearing fast. Sure, a whole list of newfangled cottage industries have sprung up in the last two decades while the internet grew to complete ubiquity, but where fast movers used to be able to get a handsome paycheck for building custom websites in the beginning, that enterprise has moved into the world of zero-cost for basic services.
It used to be that if you entered a music conservatory being able to play a selection of Chopin’s Polonaises from memory you’d instantly be the stuff of legend. Now you’re hardly a yawning annoyance if you can’t. College applications now bristle with home-recorded video demonstrations of musical masterworks simply to fill in personal gaps and suggest an interesting person trying to get in. The examples are diverse. Writers post their words on websites for free, never earning a dime. Or consider this wolf in sheep’s clothing: Amazon’s strategy is to pay self-published authors according to how many pages of text readers actually read. The illusion of payment for quantifiable consumption denies the effort to create the entirely of the work, which effectively reduces the value of the overall enterprise. Photographers (basically everyone these days) click and snap away--and share their pix for free-- and the resulting value of images plunges. Everything is free because the cost of creating things has essentially fallen to zero. What once fit into the category of rare and valuable has become ordinary commodity.
So, what’s the failed argument? It’s the simple articulation that everything should not be per page of text read for free. My argument fails because it denies reality, no matter how much I don't like that reality. I know it intimately, but I also must sadly admit that this knowledge doesn’t make it okay either.
The eternal law of supply versus demand is not up for discussion. It’s immutable. The ubiquity of creative work, discussed on this website many times before, is not in question either. Here's the deep dilemma: I have no idea how to remedy the situation. I have no idea, and yet I shout a lament about it like a frantic voice in a burning building. “Free” is good, of course. “Free” is less expensive than “not free”. But “free” is also an accelerating calamity like an avalanche gathering momentum.
There’s a measure of merit to the declaration that quality will always command a price, that top talent will always be paid. That’s true; it’s the positive flip side to the law of supply and demand. But in an era where everything is free because the cost of creation, distribution, and promotion has essentially fallen like a dead bird, the bounding box around what’s worth paying for and what’s not shrinks fast. Quality rises overall for content creation, but the overall trend for creators being able to sustain themselves does not look good beyond a certain point. It’s true that success in any arena owes a measure of credit to statistical circumstance. With a hundred excellent pianists vying for a single paying gig, quality will not be the only arbiter of how that person gets selected. When a hundred animators vie for a single freelance job to animate a singing bag of frozen vegetables for a 30 second commercial, the paid rate for that animator gets pressed down. The fact that life as an animator requires expensive gear and extensive training and practice is besides the point. To play the piano requires a PIANO, to say nothing of years of practice, and access to pianos all along, and that's beside the fact that sustained practice time don’t come cheap either. A person's gotta eat!
I fear that a trend towards “free” signals the accelerating end of intelligentsia. It’s the end because an asymptotic pursuit of shrinking micro-payments or none-at-all payments places money above the value of those goods at a fundamental level. Money becomes the only thing of value, pushing aside the potential that an idea itself might mean something despite its ability to generate a tangible return on investment. The trend toward “free” undervalues the ability to create great music because musicians cannot support themselves simply on the merits of their ability to play. The pursuit of the ability to make great music, to extend the example, requires financial support in some appreciable measure, and when those payments fall beneath a certain threshold, excellence cannot easily develop.
Sour grapes? It would be easy to point to the Taylor Swifts of the world, or the Christopher Nolans, or the Neal Stephensons and say that they managed to create financially successful artistic expressions. But the ends cannot justify the means. And what about these sour grapes: not every creative person should be able to get paid, because talent doesn’t come easily. You have to be worth it. Mediocre restaurants close for good reason. Not sour at all. I don’t pay for mediocrity, and I don’t expect society to behave differently.
Nonetheless, the overall trend makes me grimace, and it’s a trend that goes beyond the traditional arts. Regular readers know that we believe strongly that creative work exists in all sorts of places. The formal arts are leading provocateurs of culture as much as they’re also first responders, reflecting and digesting how culture evolves in near real-time. The race to the bottom for payment for creative work is an early cultural warning about a larger race to the bottom, namely the devaluing of intangible good ideas that don’t immediately translate into immediate objects that can be commodified and sold.
I declare that culture should not be free, and that people who create culture (that’s YOU, regardless of what you do for a living) should not be undervalued. And yet, it’s a declaration for which I’m having trouble holding up my head, because it’s a declaration for which I’m struggling to find a good alternative.