McKenzie Wark, author of the classic Hacker Manifesto, has written a long, smart review of my book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free (now in paperback) for the Los Angeles Review of Books. It’s a genuinely excellent piece of critical writing — I think it’s my favorite review of this book so far.
A number of writers — including Douglas Rushkoff and Astra Taylor — have published useful books on similar issues recently, but Doctorow comes closest among these authors to understanding the interest of creators as a class interest. In my view, the class perspective runs like this: Creators are a bit different from other workers, in ways that make it difficult to analyze their behavior and interests in the class-based terms devised to make sense of 19th-century industrial labor. For one thing, musicians, writers, sculptors, and video makers all view themselves as doing very different things, and marketing the products of their labor within very different industries. Their work is also difficult to standardize: where traditional laborers make the same thing, over and over, creators, by definition, make different things: the whole point of being a creator, and the value of what the creator makes, is that each product comes out at least a bit different. While creators, like Marx’s workers, rarely own the means of production, they don’t usually sell their labor power itself. Instead, they sell the rights to reproduce their work and make money from it.
Things become even more confusing when you consider that a lot of what creators make these days takes the form of information, as opposed to physical objects. The product of the labor is a file you can copy, regardless of whether the file is text or sound or images or moving images. Audiences, like creators, usually don’t own the means of making and distributing creative work; they need platforms and software provided by tech companies and service providers to access the creator’s work at all. The overwhelming fact about life in this overdeveloped world of ours is that we don’t make our own culture for each other. There’s a whole host of culture and communication industries that stand between the creator and the audience.
The relationship of creator to audience is mediated by what Doctorow calls “investors” and “intermediaries,” typified by Hollywood (the culture industry) and Silicon Valley (the internet-based communication industry). The investor owns a stock of creative works — images, texts, recordings — most often by controlling the copyright. The intermediary controls the flow of information: they own the means of getting copies of those books or songs to audiences. Sometimes the investor and intermediary are parts of the same multinational company, and often they are not.
Investors, when they can, will try to jack up the price of reproducing creative work. Intermediaries, when they can, will take advantage of creative work they can get for free. They will also try to monopolize the channel, inflate the price to the audience, and low-ball what they pay to the investor. Since creators have the least bargaining power of everyone involved in these transactions, they usually get the rough end of the pineapple.
