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tahnanMost of my friendslist has probably already seen the Luddite rant from the vice president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. (If you missed it, and you care, it's here.) One of the key phrases that caught people's attention was "the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch". (Another was the use of "scabs", specifically "webscabs", to refer to writers who posted their work for free online.) Monday has been declared Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, in which many SF writers will, for the day, post work for free on the web.
I don't have a lot to say--there's a lot wrong with what Hendrix said, and most of that's already been discussed at length elsewhere--but since I'd typed up the following thoughts in an IM session with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cnoocy, I figured I'd post 'em here, slightly edited. Sparked, roughly, by his comment that he "admit[s] to feeling a bit excluded by Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. There's already venues (like sourcefourge.net) for programmers to make professional-quality work available to the world for free."
What's interesting about his concept of webscabs is this: it's very much about how people who create X (where in this case X is "science fiction writing") are a single community who should look out for one another; thus, none of them should post their stuff on the web because it hurts the community, i.e., it encourages consumers to read that instead of buying the stuff that generates money for non-PSTWs.
So, already, that's a pretty flawed argument--I read a lot of things on the web and nevertheless buy Brust and Bujold and Butcher and Kay in print. [Note: to say nothing of the print sales an author generates by putting some things out for free. Software companies in particular know this: game demos, freeware accessories like Adobe Acrobat. Anyway.] But all the same, there's a real sense in which it just plain can't apply to programmers: it presupposes that all programmers are a single community, and that your allegiance must be to that community. But is an Open Source programmer likely to feel remotely bad that Microsoft loses a sale when someone downloads OpenOffice?
It's also fairly broken when applied to academics: in the first sense, in that someone who reads my free-on-the-web paper will still want to read the paper by Romero that was published in an expensive academic journal. But also in the second sense: since Romero doesn't make the slightest bit of money when her paper is published in a journal, why should I care for her sake whether or not I'm discouraging people from buying it? I'm not hurting her, saleswise, I'm hurting--if anyone, and again, I doubt I am--some publishing company.
So thinking about the PSTW in relation to non-writerly professions is broken on more than one level. I think there are flaws [cnoocy's example: if Author You Like puts stuff online for free and thereby hurts sales of Author You Don't, is it a bad thing? Other examples above] in applying his model to SF writers in the first place. But I think there are other flaws, even if you accept that he's 100% right about the way the SFWA works or should work, when you then try to apply his argument to programmers or academics. Which is why Open Source programs are already so widespread, and why there are invaluable online archives of academic paper preprints and unpublished manuscripts and so forth.
That's my $.02. I'm going to get dinner now.
I don't have a lot to say--there's a lot wrong with what Hendrix said, and most of that's already been discussed at length elsewhere--but since I'd typed up the following thoughts in an IM session with
cnoocy, I figured I'd post 'em here, slightly edited. Sparked, roughly, by his comment that he "admit[s] to feeling a bit excluded by Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. There's already venues (like sourcefourge.net) for programmers to make professional-quality work available to the world for free."What's interesting about his concept of webscabs is this: it's very much about how people who create X (where in this case X is "science fiction writing") are a single community who should look out for one another; thus, none of them should post their stuff on the web because it hurts the community, i.e., it encourages consumers to read that instead of buying the stuff that generates money for non-PSTWs.
So, already, that's a pretty flawed argument--I read a lot of things on the web and nevertheless buy Brust and Bujold and Butcher and Kay in print. [Note: to say nothing of the print sales an author generates by putting some things out for free. Software companies in particular know this: game demos, freeware accessories like Adobe Acrobat. Anyway.] But all the same, there's a real sense in which it just plain can't apply to programmers: it presupposes that all programmers are a single community, and that your allegiance must be to that community. But is an Open Source programmer likely to feel remotely bad that Microsoft loses a sale when someone downloads OpenOffice?
It's also fairly broken when applied to academics: in the first sense, in that someone who reads my free-on-the-web paper will still want to read the paper by Romero that was published in an expensive academic journal. But also in the second sense: since Romero doesn't make the slightest bit of money when her paper is published in a journal, why should I care for her sake whether or not I'm discouraging people from buying it? I'm not hurting her, saleswise, I'm hurting--if anyone, and again, I doubt I am--some publishing company.
So thinking about the PSTW in relation to non-writerly professions is broken on more than one level. I think there are flaws [cnoocy's example: if Author You Like puts stuff online for free and thereby hurts sales of Author You Don't, is it a bad thing? Other examples above] in applying his model to SF writers in the first place. But I think there are other flaws, even if you accept that he's 100% right about the way the SFWA works or should work, when you then try to apply his argument to programmers or academics. Which is why Open Source programs are already so widespread, and why there are invaluable online archives of academic paper preprints and unpublished manuscripts and so forth.
That's my $.02. I'm going to get dinner now.
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Date: 2007-04-18 02:47 pm (UTC)Is there a word for witticisms like "sick-o-fancy" (a word spelled phonetically in such a way that it becomes other words)? He uses them a lot. It comes off as snide and pretentious. I had never heard of him before, and now I kind of hate him, just because of his style -- the power of words, indeed!
I also love how he thinks wanting to spend more time with your family is a cop-out.