Tumblr Stealing and The Death Of Ideas
A couple of odd things have happened over the prior months. One, Tumblr has taken off as a singular application phenomenon almost unlike any I’ve ever seen in the past. Rarely does a web application pick up this many users this quickly unless it is something destined to become a core web application. Two, it’s been very noticable that Gawker, one of the most prominent blogs, has been taking quite a bit of credited and uncredited content from various Tumblr users. (I cite “uncredited content” because, given the circumstances in individual cases, it’s most likely that Gawker editors discovered the content in question from a lone Tumblr user who mentioned the concept for the first time earlier in the day) The idea I’m presenting here is not that they actually did it (or that they are fair or unfair in their attribution habits), but that they clearly CAN do it.
Tumblr, being highly efficient in the spread of ideas, is useful to news organizations in a way that makes obsolete existing parts of the business. The role of a writer as a expert, as an experienced and learned person, is being lost to the increasing practice of using crowdsourced information to build editorial content. It seems that, as amateur publishing applications improve in their reach and connectivity, well-developed ideas are easier to pluck out of the blogosphere/zeitgeist. And if the ideas are not just well-thought but well-written (cue the “infinite monkeys” metaphor), this eliminates the need for news writers altogether.
This isn’t just about news writers, though. This is about any task that requires thinking and ideas. Advertisers increasingly rely on consumer contests for new ideas, something that was eliminated long ago within the profession by the stigmatization of “spec work”. Fashion designers can increasingly rely on blogging amateurs to do much of the work of presenting new samples and combinations. Entertainment companies can scour the web for amateur performers who are desperate to be “discovered”, but who are far more likely to either be “copied” or “exploited”. Really, any activity that doesn’t strictly involve pushing numbers can be crowdsourced. (Sometimes, even that can be farmed out over the Internet to amateurs, depending on how charitable or competitive the cause looks)
There’s a problem in this. How do you finance this? Without wealth, it’s unlikely that people will be able to continue sharing ideas online forever. Rent needs to be paid, computers need to be bought, Internet access costs money. If ideas are no longer saleable in the career marketplace (because they’re available so freely online), then what pays the bills? Tedious work? Actually, that won’t do it either, because that’s all getting farmed out to India and Russia. Remember, the first wave of outsourcing (aka “importing”) worked because we could push physical labor overseas or across borders and get the finished product for cheaper. Then the next wave of outsourcing (which is what you think of when you hear that term) promised that common office functions and repetitive/tedious tasks could be pushed overseas for even more efficient business operations. But this was supposed to help us by keeping all the really valuable mental jobs here in the US. Now, finally, this last wave of outsourcing threatens to eliminate creative work by simply relying on bloggers who talk enough on the Internet to do creative things you’d normally need done on deadline.
So, basically, there’s no financing left for people who have ideas, because there’s not enough jobs here (that pay enough) to finance the people who are educated and talented enough to have these ideas, and these same people were coincidentally the ones writing the blogs in the first place - what, you thought the Tumblrites were anyone but college-educated working professionals? If there isn’t money to pay for people going to college and then getting on the Internet after the fact, people aren’t going to go to college and then go on the Internet. Which means the ideas disappear. And then the whole system falls apart, because the ideas drive both the office work (including finance, which is grossly overpaid right now) and the need for manufacturing. Not to mention the fact that jobs and wealth drive the consumer economy, which is now falling apart due to the abuse of credit facilities across all financial markets and economies.
The great thing about smart people, though, is that they’ll go where the money is, because that’s the smart thing to do… and, even in the presence of business trends that are moving toward crowdsourced ideas in the short-term, smart investors and managers will continue to seek highly-creative employeeswho will keep them ahead of the game when the idea-thirsty companies are suffering. In other words, the solution to the problem is to do what has always been done - keep the people who drive your business happy and well-paid.
I write this as a warning to anyone who tries to get away with excessive crowdsourcing. It simply doesn’t work. It creates unsustainable products of negligible value. The market rejects it. Businesses thrive on ideas and the progress obtained from them, and businesses need a lot of ideas to really flourish. But ideas need to have worth and pricing in order for people to reliably produce them. People don’t stick around the web to provide valuable free ideas forever. Employees and managers who rely on that are lame ducks in the business world.