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The Course of Words

Free Blockheads

Copyright 2009 Ben S. Pollock

A newsmagazine commentary from a couple of weeks ago stopped me cold. I still think about it, in a similar way a comic panel from last year comes up, which has put me off Outback’s Bloomin’ Onions. These are like cloying old songs that once heard reverberate for days within the skull.

Speaking of skulls, let’s discuss blockheads, as considered by the venerable Samuel Johnson:

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

For a long time I fully agreed, only that it didn’t yet apply to me, making me a blockhead, a fool. Brick obviously has no money behind it. Or in front, either. I’ve been paid for writing only a few times per century. Oh, there’s been indirect compensation, writing a column a week while editing the other 35-39 hours. For putting up with such an arrangement, Dr. Johnson would kick people like me out of the coffee house. I wonder if that’s how pubs came to flourish, when the English coffee houses emptied for want of compensated scribes.

Noting someone named Francis Wilkinson agrees with Dr. Johnson does not raise the former to the latter. Earlier in March he wrote in The Week magazine more than 800 words what the good doctor accomplished in 10. I see Wilkinson’s point, and even though it is wrong, it still makes me angry.

Rather than quote and quote the essay, why don’t you click to it and see for yourself. In a hurry? Allow me: Wilkinson goes into a fair amount of detail about how writers in recent decades invariably were paid, though rarely much. Now, however, there’s even less pay, relative to inflation but more so relative to Internet opportunities. He believes that only writers whose money comes from elsewhere will be able to afford to produce and the society will lose needed voices. Wilkinson has one personal example: His experience editing at the online Huffington Post. It pays writers nothing yet has been overrun with submissions since its beginning.

Wilkinson professes not to understand. Yet his credit line indicates he is his news magazine’s executive editor. His column is a sideline, proving his point, that the world of prose will narrow to those who can afford to. Only he avoids the argument. “HuffPo” attracts writers who find satisfaction outside of remuneration. Most writers do.

Even in Johnson’s time, 1709-1784, few writers wrote for money and the rest were not blockheads. Those Brits who were literate did not have phones, podcasts or television. If they weren’t face-to-face, they wrote — letters. If you couldn’t write, you’d hire someone to take your dictation.

Paging Cyrano de Bergerac, white courtesy telephone. Paging Cyrano …”

For centuries, people have written to communicate. They wrote in order to be written back to. They wrote in order to be heard or, rather, to be read. Money would be nice, but it’s not the only economy. Here are two terrific examples, John and Abigail Adams; you may know them from their TV show, now on DVD.

There’s a prime reason why people make words, crafts or art besides getting greenbacks. I’m only now learning about this so can’t explain it well. Its common name is the Gift Economy. It’s not some form of communism/socialism/terrorism/anarchism out to defeat capitalism while boosting Rush Limbaugh’s ratings to oppose. Giving is reciprocal, but precision in the exchange often devalues it. For young geeks, file sharing is a Gift Economy exchange, not a Market Economy one. Wilkinson only acknowledges the Market (or Barter) Economy. Gift Economy is what sociologists and philosophers, and law school heroes and surely economists (though I haven’t read them yet) have termed this, awkward for the ambiguity of “gift,” and created models and histories for it.

Most of law professor Lawrence Lessig‘s books start from the premise of the Gift Economy. Lessig helped found Creative Commons, to protect those intellectual rights worth bothering about. Lewis Hyde explores the world of artists and art lovers in his book The Gift, and the more recent Common as Air, where trade can be explained only partially by exchanging money for a picture to hang or a book to read.

The Gift Economy can help explain why capping the accessibility of free news on the Internet will prove to be impossible. The Gift Economy is not a competitor to capitalism as communism is commonly thought to be. Gift and Market are complementary. Each fills different needs of society, and a healthy society allows a flowing equilibrium between both of them.

The Market Economy and Wilkinson find an oversupply of writers. The Gift Economy does not tabulate them. Most writing these days more closely resembles letters than anything else.

The Gift Economy even applies to market-successful artists. It does not apply only to art no one buys or capital-L literature few read. Writing to formula as a hack is no gift. Stephen King is wildly successful and enviably prolific, yet in reading any of his works the kick this artist gets from spinning tales is as obvious as the nose on Cyrano’s face.

Update to Johnson:

No one but a hack ever wrote, except for money.”

People like us enjoy creating — words, woodcarving, fishing lures — and it’s a reverse-lagniappe if someone actually takes a look. As I mature, it grows more attractive.

This Good Depression (the Great Depression was suffered by the Greatest Generation, and at best we’re just a Good Generation) accelerates such contemplation. All that I previously understood was based on Johnson, that a lack of pay proves futility. It does not. No that I won’t accept lucre, but my world has gotten a lot simpler since I quit scheming to write for money.

I’m not blocked anymore.

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3 replies on “Free Blockheads”

I’m not sure I understand why the Wilkinson essay makes you angry. You say he proves his point but avoids the argument, and it seems to me you also go on to prove his point: People want to communicate and will do it for nothing but the pleasure of it.

This makes it harder than ever for anyone to make a career simply out of writing. If more experienced, more educated, more expert people are already writing, and often for “free,” how does a poor, young keyboard jockey make a career. What puts food on the table?

I have a certain skill in writing (headlines at least), but my real salary in 2007 was about the same as my real salary in 1990. I wasn’t in the same market, but still through the majority of my career I lost money to 17 years of inflation, and I was considered highly paid at my office.

As you conclude, writing is a lot easier since you gave up trying to do it for money. Make a calling of it if you want, but if you want a career, keep your day job and write by candlelight.

The question for me becomes whether this proliferation of writers-at-ease can invest the time and resources in investigative reporting. Most of us write about what we know, but can this sort of insider-blogging culture produce exposes? Or will we have a cacophony of foxes explaining the good job they do guarding the henhouses?

As long as we’re sharing a booth at the Johnson-Boswell-Pepys-Swift espresso shop, I’d like to respond to this comment, linking as well to your thoughtful essay, Bruce. Wilkinson neither pushed his point definitively or deflected it into ironic detachment. His ending was soft, like too many professional essays these days. You’ve got the multimillion forum, Wilkie, show us you mean it.

It’s not so much the underpayment of talented writers, which goes back at least to the Gospels, but how we should consider the practice now. The reference to the Gift Economy is more about how bloggers belong to the world of open-source software, the self-policing Wikipedia, and on to how you and mutual friends have shared macros/scripts, as opposed to penning a letter to the editor in the library at the club, single malt at the elbow.

Goodness yes, reporting suffers in this new form. It is a skill, though its rudiments are not difficult. Bloggers by and large shouldn’t find it a priority. We’re not writing for the world, except in our dreams, but for a circle of extended friends. Only by being uniquely profound at the right instant — and a moment is all the Internet affords us — or by being incredibly awful will some Ben Blogger snap a record of viewer hits. And that will be transient. As writing for our fellow foxes at the virtual coffee house, how satisfying.

Nearly every Brick has research, for that is my journalism slapping me; note the links. But Internet searches do not constitute reporting to a newspaperman like me. For Brick, reporting is hampered from both a constraint of time and humility. When I do observe, interview or otherwise take notes, I put the Bricks in a distinct category. Otherwise, gumshoe research requires effort, which for me is a Market Economy transaction, for pay. To get an attaboy or a chance to view someone else’s interview as a reciprocal gift is insufficient, doesn’t set right. Secondly, it feels weird to whip out a notebook when talking to someone then explain, “It’s for my blog of several dozen regulars.”

I guess I’m still not quite in sync.

So, like the all-female dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park,” writers “will find a way” to survive, even reproduce? As long as there is subway graffiti and we have our blogs for “several dozen regulars,” society will have all the voices it needs? And at appropriate volume?

Are you arguing that writing has always been at the margins of the market economy and so we should not have too much anxiety over further marginalization, or are you arguing that given the anxiety, we need to show more forcefully how bad it will be when only the comfortable will write?

Maybe you’re arguing both.

For what it’s worth, though I complained about diminishing returns over my career, I agree that money is not why most of us write. We have a visceral need to connect.

Nevertheless, I do worry that newspapers dying and writers having dwindling market value poses a certain risk to the information flow (a worsening signal to noise ratio, a normalizing of the messages into a dull sameness). This, I think, was the main thrust of Wilkinson’s piece, and it seems you are “angry” at his thesis for something a bit sideways of that.

One of those situations where it seems everybody’s generally in the same pack yet yipping at the other dogs.

Hope I’m not sounding too snarly, I’m really trying to tilt my head and cock my ears and be sure I’m understanding what you’re saying.

As always, this loyal buddy is happy to visit this little virtual cafe and ponder the ways of the world.

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