Information wants to be free, fine—but art isn’t information.
Clay Shirky, an information and technology guru who’s written some really interesting and insightful stuff, has a mad-on against micropayments. For whatever reason, he doesn’t like the idea of charging users a small amount for content delivered over the web—his essay, “The Case Against Micropayments,” has been the go-to piece since it was written in 2000 for the camp that insists information wants to be free, and paying for content over something as immediate as the web will never work. Of course, no workable micropayment system has emerged since then—certainly nothing to match the grandiose dreams of 1998—so there’s been no need to say anything more on the subject.
Until BitPass. This simple system, still in its beta test, is gathering steam and making noise, so Shirky has updated his stance with an essay entitled “Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content.” Here’s the entirety of his argument against BitPass:
BitPass will fail, as FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, and many others have in the decade since Digital Silk Road, the paper that helped launch interest in micropayments. These systems didn’t fail because of poor implementation; they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response.
The failure of BitPass is not terribly interesting in itself. What is interesting is the way the failure of micropayments, both past and future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large, user-pays schemes can’t simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don’t address the cause of that change—a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator.
He then goes on to say some interesting and insightful things about blogs and news, but almost nothing at all about art, and artists, and the power of fandom.
Shirky’s argument fails ultimately because he seems to see an audience’s need for art as a hole that can be filled by any old content: and if you can fill it with free content, why on earth would you pay? Sure, blogs will (rarely) be important enough to inspire their audience to plop down a dime for every entry—but a Firefly fan isn’t going to just as happily sit down and watch Fastlane just because they want some entertainment on a Friday night.
Luckily, Scott McCloud and Joey Manley are both there in the clench, with eloquent, powerful rebuttals. Dirk Deppey says he’ll have something to say on Monday. —But I’ve got to go to work at my day job right now, so that’s all you’re going to get from me at the moment.
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