Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

recently, there was a debate on lbo about some rant by sean keenan about the crazee that is the internet. he was railing at the way putting your content u p for free increasingly requires this huge investment in time because there are so many people doing it, you have to really work hard to raise your signal to all the noise. yadda. so, not only to you give away your music, you end up spending a lot of time - unpaid - trying to even give it away.

one of the things that chaps my behind about this and related issue is the lifestyle moralism that always emerges. You’d see this, sometimes, in the way the feminist bloggers would flip out if another feminist blogger had any kind of economic success. You see it a lot when it comes to money in general. There’s this notion that money is filthy lucre, tawdry, that to be interested in earning a buck is not properly lefty. That it is wrong or some kind of blow against socialism that you are interested in protecting your time from abuse by others who would like you to spend your time creating or writing or whatever for the cause and do it all for free or incredibly cheaply.

it all reminded me of what happened when Doug’s rights to his book reverted to him. I read through the old thread from five years ago. I had to laugh, people started wondering how managed to survive as a writer.

I know how he does, and it’s not just from the newsletter. But the sad thing is, the truth is, if it was widely known how Doug made part of his living, a lot of people would attack Doug for it. It makes me sad and pisses me off all at once. I can just picture it now. In every debate where things got nasty, I can imagine how some asswipe would raise the issue of how he makes his living, using logical fallacy by trying to trash Doug and claiming that the way he makes part of his living renders his ideas worthless.

Because, apparently, making a living is, you know, a bad thing.

I was also thinking about something someone asked, about how Prince’s lawsuit against Google was just a continuum on a scale of dastardly deeds implementing the same horrid private property logic as the lawsuits that attempt to throw kids in jail for downloading pirated music. Sure, I thought. And I thought, well, I hardly care about prince. But then I remembered that I DO give a shit about the way some lefty publications I’m familiar with get ripped off by outfits like CBS.

and then I remembered how I’d once consulted - for free! yes indeedy, I really DO donate my labor sometimes ;) — for a lefty outfit. I was telling them how they could improve their site to get better ranking in the search engines, improved findability, and more traffic. More traffic - more sales of their books, more donations, etc.

I told them that, among other things, I could help them with a campaign of writing affiliated lefty sites, to ask them to link to them, especially if they are already quoting their material, etc.

it turns out that the lefty outfit in question has an article by a famous person. it’s really popular. Due to some legal trust or something, this lefty outfit has to protect the IP of the famous person who wrote this article.

But when the lefty pub writes people to ask them to stop posting the article, the other lefty outfit invariably get all het up and excited that Lefty Publication dares, DARES, to act like a big fat owner of its IP.!
*rolls eyes*

The link back campaign would likely be a dud, they thought, based on their experiences in the past. Other lefty outfits have chafed at such requests in the past. They think it is, uh, gauche or something to, you know, give a shit about page rank in the search engines - because it might be a little like making fucking money.

we briefly discussed pulling in some advertising, to at least help pay for some of the development and upgrades they needed. Nope This would offend the sensibilities of the readership.

honestly, this shit just drives me batty. Filthy Lucre! The horror!

All i have to say to this attitude is, “Fuck you, pay me.”