Anomalous Presumptions

This analysis of the Firedoglake coverage of the Libby trial hits essentially all the issues we’ve been discussing.

• Money was required, but it was generated by small contributions from stakeholders (the audience), targeted to this specific project.
• A relatively small amount of money was sufficient because the organization was very lightweight and the contributors were doing it for more than just money.
• The quality was higher than the work done by the conventional organizations (news media) because the FDL group was larger and more dedicated. They had a long prior engagement with this story.
• FDL could afford to put more feet on the ground than the (much better funded) news media, because they were so cost-effective.
• The group (both the FDL reporters and their contributors) self-organized around this topic so their structure was very well suited to the task.
• Entrepreneurship was a big factor — both long-term organization of the site, and short-term organization of the coverage.
• FDL, with no prior journalistic learning curve, and no professional credentials, beat the professional media on their coverage of a high-profile hard-core news event.

This example suggests that we don’t yet know the inherent limits of this post-capitalist approach to production of (at least) information goods. Most discussions of blogs vs. (traditional) news media have assumed the the costs inherent in “real reporting” meant blogs couldn’t do it effectively. The FDL example shows, among other things, that the majority of those costs (at least in this case) are due to institutional overhead that can simply be left out of the new model.

We’re also discovering that money can easily be raised to cover specific needs, if an audience is very engaged and/or large. Note that even when raising money, the relationship remains voluntary rather than transactional — people contribute dollars without imposing any explicit obligations on their recipient. No one incurs the burden of defining and enforcing terms. In case of fraud or just disappointing performance, the “customers” will quickly withdraw from the relationship, so problems will be self-limiting.

It is interesting to speculate about how far this approach could go. To pick an extreme example, most of the current cost of new drugs is not manufacturing (which will remain capital intensive for the forseeable future), but rather is the information goods — research, design, testing, education of providers, etc. — needed to bring drugs to market. At this point it seems impossible that these processes could be carried out in a post-capitalist way. But perhaps this is a failure of imagination.

Filed by Jed at 7:36 pm under Economics, Future, Social order
No Comments