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

Baudelaire to ruefully proclaim that the “prostitution of the poet” was “an unavoidable necessity.”

      Yet the challenge of maintaining oneself in a world of money is hardly a problem unique to the creatively inclined. This dilemma may not trouble those who choose to pursue wealth above all else, but most people seek work that feeds both the spirit and the belly. Likewise, the cultural realm is not the only sphere in which some essential part cannot be bought or sold. Teaching, therapy, medicine, science, architecture, design, even politics and law when practiced to serve the public good—certainly the gift operates within these fields as well. The gift can even be detected in supposedly menial jobs where people, in good faith, do far more than meager wages require of them. Creative people are not the only ones who struggle desperately to balance the contradictory demands of the gift and the market. But culture is the domain where this quandary is often most visible and acknowledged. Culture is one stage on which we play out our anxieties about the impact of market values on our inner lives. As we transition to a digital age, this anxiety is in full view.

      The supposed conflict between amateurs and professionals sparked by the Internet speaks to a deep and long-standing confusion about the relationship between work and creativity in our society. Artists, we imagine, are grasshoppers, singing while ants slog away—or butterflies: delicate and flighty creatures who, stranded in a beehive, have the audacity to demand honey. No matter how exacting or extensive the effort a project requires, if the process allows for some measure of self-realization, it’s not unpleasant or self-sacrificing enough to fit our conception of work as drudgery. We tend to believe that the labor of those who appear to love what they do does not by definition qualify as labor.

      We have succumbed, as the essayist Rebecca Solnit put it to me, to the “conventionalized notion of work as the forty hours of submission to another’s purpose snipped out of your life (and leaving a hole in your heart and mind).” Along the way we ignore the fact that many people, not only members of the vaunted “professional” class, love their jobs. “A lot of builders and firemen really enjoy themselves. Bakers and cooks can be pretty happy, and so can some farmers and fishermen.” Nor should we romanticize creative labor, she noted: “Most artists don’t love all parts of their work—I hate all the administration, the travel, the bad posture, the excess solitude, and the uncertainty about my own caliber and my future.”

      In the 1951 classic White Collar, sociologist C. Wright Mills presented a powerful alternative to the stark dichotomies of amateurs versus professionals. Examining the emerging category of office worker, Mills advocated, instead, for what he called the Renaissance view of work, a process that would allow for not only the creation of objects but the development of the self—an act both mental and manual that “confesses and reveals” us to the world. The problem, as Mills saw it, was that development of the self was trivialized into “hobbies”—they were being amateurized, in other words—and so relegated to the lesser realm of leisure as opposed to the realm of legitimate labor.¹⁶

      “Each day men sell little pieces of themselves in order to try to buy them back each night and week end with the coin of fun,” wrote Mills, despairing of a cycle that splits us in two: an at-work self and an at-play self, the person who produces for money and the person who produces for love.¹⁷ New-media thinkers believe social production and amateurism transcend the old problem of alienated labor by allowing us to work for love, not money, but in fact the unremunerated future they anticipate will only deepen a split that many desperately desire to reconcile.

      Innovations and invention were expected to bring about humankind’s inevitable release from alienated labor. The economist John Maynard Keynes once predicted that the four-hour workday was close at hand and that technical improvements in manufacturing would allow ample time for people to focus on “the art of life itself.” Into the 1960s experts agonized over the possibility of a “crisis of leisure time,” which they prophesized would sweep the country—a crisis precipitated not for want of time off but by an excess of it.

      In 1967, testimony before a Senate subcommittee indicated that “by 1985 people could be working just 22 hours a week or 27 weeks a year or could retire at 38.” Over the ensuing decades countless people have predicted that machines would facilitate the “end of work” by automating drudgery and freeing humans to perform labor they enjoy (“Let the robots take the jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters,” concludes one Wired cover story rehashing this old idea).¹⁸

      New-media thinkers do not pretend this future has come to pass, but in Cognitive Surplus Clay Shirky presents what can be read as a contemporary variation on this old theme, explaining how the cumulative free time of the world’s educated population—an estimated trillion hours a year—is being funneled into creative, collaborative projects online.¹⁹ Time is something Shirky claims we have a growing abundance of thanks to two factors: steadily increasing prosperity and a decline of television viewing. The Web, he argues, challenges us to stop thinking of time as “individual minutes to be whiled away” and imagine it, instead, as a “social asset that can be harnessed.”²⁰

      Projects like Wikipedia, message boards, and the latest viral memes are creative paradigms for a new age: entertaining, inclusive, easy to make, and efficient—the accumulation of tidbits of attention from thousands of people around the world. Much of the art and culture of the future, he wagers, will be produced in a similar manner, by pooling together spare moments spent online. Our efforts shall be aggregated, all the virtual crumbs combining to make a cake. Institutions will be supplanted as a consequence of the deployment of this surplus.²¹

      Shirky’s contributions reveal not how far we’ve progressed in pursuit of “the art of life” but how much ground has been lost since Keynes, how our sense of what’s possible has been circumscribed despite the development of new, networked wonders. Today’s popular visionary imagines us hunched over our computers with a few idle minutes to spare, our collective clicks supposed to substitute for what was once the promise of personal creative development—the freedom to think, feel, create, and act with the whole of one’s being.

      In addition to other problematic aspects of his argument, Shirky’s two foundational assertions—that television watching is down and that free time has increased over recent decades—are both unfounded. Despite competition from the Internet, television viewing has generally risen over recent years, with the average American taking in nearly five hours of video each day, 98 percent through a traditional TV set. “Americans,” a 2012 Nielsen report states, “are not turning off.”²²

      According to economists, with the exception of those who suffer from under- and unemployment, work hours have actually risen. Those lucky enough to be fully employed are, in fact, suffering from “time impoverishment.” Today the average citizen works longer hours for less money than he or she once did, putting in an extra four and a half weeks a year compared to 1979. Married couples with children are on the job an extra 413 hours, or an extra ten weeks a year, combined.²³Adding salt to the wounds, the United States is the only industrialized nation where employers are not required by law to provide workers any paid vacation time.²⁴

      The reason the prophecies of Mills and Keynes never came to pass is obvious but too often overlooked: new technologies do not emerge in a vacuum free of social, political, and economic influences. Context is all-important. On their own, labor-saving machines, however ingenious, are not enough to bring about a society of abundance and leisure, as the Luddites who destroyed the power looms set to replace them over two centuries ago knew all too well. If we want to see the fruits of technological innovation widely shared, it will require conscious effort and political struggle. Ultimately, outcomes are shaped as much by the capabilities of new technologies as by the wider circumstances in which they operate.

      Baumol and Bowen, for example, made their rosy predictions against the backdrop of a social consensus now in tatters. When they wrote their report in the sixties, the prevailing economic orthodoxy said that both prosperity and risk should be broadly spread. Health care, housing, and higher education were more accessible to more people than they had ever been. Bolstered by a strong labor movement, unemployment was low and wages high by today’s standards. There was talk of shortened workweeks and guaranteed annual