The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. Astra Taylor

model is being replaced by a decentralized, networked system open to all. Barriers to entry have been removed, gatekeepers have been demolished, and the costs of creating and distributing culture have plummeted. New tools not only have made cultural production more efficient but have equalized opportunity.

      NYU professor Clay Shirky, perhaps the leading proponent of this view, calls this process “social production.” Harvard’s Yochai Benkler uses the term “peer production,” business writer Jeff Howe calls it “crowdsourcing,” and Don Tapscott and his coauthor Anthony D. Williams say “wikinomics.” Whatever term they use, the commentators agree that a revolution is unfolding, with the potential to transform not just culture but also politics and the economy. They put social production on a pedestal, holding it up as more egalitarian, ethical, and efficient than the old model it is said to supersede.

      Tapping the deep vein of American populism, new-media thinkers portray the amateur ethos flourishing online as a blow against the elitism and exclusivity of the professions, their claims to expertise and authority, and the organizations they depend on, and there’s something appealing about this view.¹⁰ The professional class is not blameless by any means: it has erected often arbitrary barriers in the form of credentialing and licensing and has often failed to advance the public good while securing its own position.

      The professions, as many others have observed, have served as a kind of “class fortress,” excluding talented, motivated people in service of monopolistic self-preservation. (“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution” is known in tech circles as the Shirky principle.) It is this aspect of professionalism that outrages Internet apostles, who celebrate the liberation from professionals who claim special knowledge and cheer the fact that authority is shifting from “faraway offices to the network of people we know, like, and respect.”¹¹

      More far-reaching, mass amateurization is said to reveal something profound about human nature. Social media, enthusiasts contend, prove that long-dominant assumptions were wrong. The abundance of user-generated content, no matter how silly or derivative, reveals an intrinsic creative drive. While most of us probably didn’t need the Internet to show us that human beings share an irrepressible urge to create and share—an “art instinct”—for some this truism is a revelation.

      It follows, by this logic, that if people are intrinsically motivated to produce culture, and technology enables them to act on this motivation effortlessly and affordably and without financial reward, then amateurs are less compromised than compensated professionals and thus superior. “Amateurs,” Shirky writes, “are sometimes separated from professionals by skill, but always by motivation; the term itself derives from the Latin amare—‘to love.’ The essence of amateurism is intrinsic motivation: to be an amateur is to do something for the love of it.”

      Making a similar case, Yochai Benkler likens cultural creation to blood drives: the quality of donations increases when organizers stop paying.¹² “Remember, money isn’t always the best motivator,” Benkler said, reiterating the point during a TED Talk touching on similar themes. “If you leave a fifty-dollar check after dinner with friends, you don’t increase the probability of being invited back. And if dinner isn’t entirely obvious, think of sex.”¹³

      So it won’t matter if some people’s operating costs end up exceeding their earned income. A well-received academic monograph about the impact of online file sharing on music production, published under the auspices of Harvard Business School, echoes these insights, allaying any suspicion one might have that lack of income could inhibit the world’s creative output. The authors argue that a decline in “industry profitability” won’t hurt production because artists’ unique motivations will keep them churning out music even if they are operating at a loss. “The remuneration of artistic talent differs from other types of labor in at least two important respects. On the one hand, artists often enjoy what they do, suggesting they might continue being creative even when the monetary incentives to do so become weaker. In addition, artists receive a significant portion of their remuneration not in monetary form.” To quote the professors, “many of them enjoy fame, admiration, social status, and free beer in bars.”¹⁴

      Another paper, published with the romantic title “Money Ruins Everything,” comes to a similar conclusion. Its authors, a team of social scientists, were stunned by what they found online: throngs of people who, instead of engaging in cost-benefit analysis, “produce content for the love of it, for the joy of expressing themselves, because it is fun, to demonstrate that they are better at it than others, or for a host of other non-commercial motivations.” The very existence of creators who “produce content for the love of it and are prepared to work for free—or even to lose money to feed their desire to create” upends traditional models of media production. If you want insight into the culture of the future, they say, just look at Wikipedia, the open source software community, and popular photo-sharing services. There are millions of people who contribute user-generated content without promise of remuneration or reward.

      This distinction between love and money seems self-evident and uncomplicated. If the choice is between a powerful record mogul and a teenager uploading a video of himself singing in his bedroom, or the inanity of a high-grossing nightly cable news host versus some insightful commentary on a personal Web site, who wouldn’t side with the little person? But the distinction is deceptive. What sounds like idealism, upon further reflection, reveals itself to be the opposite. For one thing, it is deeply cynical to deny professionals any emotional investment in their work. Can we really argue that creative professionals—filmmakers, writers, architects, graphic designers, and so on—do not care deeply about what they do? And what about doctors, teachers, and scientists?

      The corollary of Benkler’s and Shirky’s argument is that only those who despise their work deserve to be paid for their efforts.¹⁵ It’s worth pointing out that these men—despite their enthusiasm for social production—release their books with conventional publishers and hold positions at elite academic institutions. Surely they do not believe their work as professional writers, researchers, and teachers is suspect because they were compensated. There is a note of truth in the idea that adversity fuels creativity, but when reduced to an economic truism—a decline in industry profitability won’t hurt artistic production because artists will work for beer—the notion rings not just hollow but obscene.

      These tidily opposed categories of professional and amateur are ones into which few actually existing creative people perfectly fit. And the consequences of the digital upheaval are far more equivocal than the Shirkys and Benklers acknowledge. While the economics of the Web might apply to remixing memes or posting in online forums, the costs and risks associated with creative acts that require leaving one’s computer have hardly collapsed.

      Where will this new paradigm leave projects like The Oath? Following Shirky’s logic, Laura Poitras is one of those professionals who should be overthrown by noble amateurs, her labor-intensive filmmaking process a throwback to another era, before creativity was a connected, collective process. The Internet might be a wonderful thing, but you can’t crowdsource a relationship with a terrorist or a whistle-blower.

      Makers of art and culture have long straddled two economies, the economy of the gift and the economy of the market, as Lewis Hyde elegantly demonstrated in his book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Unlike other resources, Hyde explained, culture is passed from person to person, between whom it forms “feeling-bonds,” an initiation or preservation of affection. A simple purchase, on the other hand, forges no necessary connection, as any interaction at a cash register makes clear. Thus culture is a gift, a kind of glue, a covenant, but one that, unlike barter, obliges nothing in return. In other words, the fruits of creative effort exist to be shared. Yet the challenge is how to support this kind of work in a market-based society. “Invariably the money question comes up,” writes Hyde. “Labors such as mine are notoriously non-remunerative, and your landlord is not interested in your book of translations the day your rent comes due.”

      The fate of creative people is to exist in two incommensurable realms of value and be torn between them—on one side, the purely economic activity associated with the straightforward selling of goods or labor;