The grassroots rhetoric of networked amateurism has been harnessed to corporate strategy, continuing a nefarious tradition. Since the 1970s populist outrage has been yoked to free-market ideology by those who exploit cultural grievances to shore up their power and influence, directing public animus away from economic elites and toward cultural ones, away from plutocrats and toward professionals. But it doesn’t follow that criticizing “professionals” or “experts” or “cultural elites” means that we are striking a blow against the real powers; and when we uphold amateur creativity, we are not necessarily resolving the deeper problems of entrenched privilege or the irresistible imperative of profit. Where online platforms are concerned, our digital pastimes can sometimes promote positive social change and sometimes hasten the transfer of wealth to Silicon Valley billionaires.
Even well-intentioned celebration of networked amateurism has the potential to obscure the way money still circulates. That’s the problem with PressPausePlay, a slick documentary about the digital revolution that premiered at a leading American film festival. The directors examine the ways new tools have sparked a creative overhaul by allowing everyone to participate—or at least everyone who owns the latest Apple products. That many of the liberated media makers featured in the movie turn out to work in advertising and promotion, like celebrity business writer Seth Godin, who boasts of his ability to turn his books into bestsellers by harnessing the power of the Web, underscores how the hype around the cultural upheaval sparked by connective technologies easily slides from making to marketing. While the filmmakers pay tribute to DIY principles and praise the empowering potential of digital tools unavailable a decade ago, they make little mention of the fact that the telecommunications giant Ericsson provided half of the movie’s seven-hundred-thousand-dollar budget and promotional support.35
We should be skeptical of the narrative of democratization by technology alone. The promotion of Internet-enabled amateurism is a lazy substitute for real equality of opportunity. More deeply, it’s a symptom of the retreat over the past half century from the ideals of meaningful work, free time, and shared prosperity—an agenda that entailed enlisting technological innovation for the welfare of each person, not just the enrichment of the few.
Instead of devising truly liberating ways to harness machines to remake the economy, whether by designing satisfying jobs or through the social provision of a basic income to everyone regardless of work status, we have Amazon employees toiling on the warehouse floor for eleven dollars an hour and Google contract workers who get fired after a year so they don’t have to be brought on full-time. Cutting-edge new-media companies valued in the tens of billions retain employees numbering in the lowly thousands, and everyone else is out of luck. At the same time, they hoard their record-setting profits, sitting on mountains of cash instead of investing it in ways that would benefit us all.
The zeal for amateurism looks less emancipatory—as much necessity as choice—when you consider the crisis of rising educational costs, indebtedness, and high unemployment, all while the top 1 percent captures an ever-growing portion of the surplus generated by increased productivity. (Though productivity has risen 23 percent since 2000, real hourly pay has effectively stagnated.)36 The consequences are particularly stark for young people: between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth for householders under thirty-five was down 68 percent while rising 42 percent for those over sixty-five.37 Many are delaying starting families of their own and moving back in with Mom and Dad.
Our society’s increasing dependence on free labor—online and off—is immoral in this light. The celebration of networked amateurism—and of social production and the cognitive surplus—glosses over the question of who benefits from our uncompensated participation online. Though some internships are enjoyable and useful, the real beneficiary of this arrangement is corporate America, which reaps the equivalent of a two-billion-dollar annual subsidy.38 And many of the digital platforms to which we contribute are highly profitable entities, run not for love but for money.
Creative people have historically been encouraged to ignore economic issues and maintain indifference to matters like money and salaries. Many of us believe that art and culture should not succumb to the dictates of the market, and one way to do this is to act as though the market doesn’t exist, to devise a shield to deflect its distorting influence, and uphold the lack of compensation as virtuous. This stance can provide vital breathing room, but it can also perpetuate inequality. “I consistently come across people valiantly trying to defy an economic class into which they were born,” Richard Florida writes. “This is particularly true of the young descendants of the truly wealthy—the capitalist class—who frequently describe themselves as just ‘ordinary’ creative people working on music, film or intellectual endeavors of one sort or another.”
How valiant to deny the importance of money when it is had in abundance. “Economic power is first and foremost a power to keep necessity at arm’s length,” the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu observed. Especially, it seems, the necessity of talking honestly about economics.
Those who applaud social production and networked amateurism, the colorful cacophony that is the Internet, and the creative capacities of everyday people to produce entertaining and enlightening things online, are right to marvel. There is amazing inventiveness, boundless talent and ability, and overwhelming generosity on display. Where they go wrong is in thinking that the Internet is an egalitarian, let alone revolutionary, platform for our self-expression and development, that being able to shout into the digital torrent is adequate for democracy.
The struggle between amateurs and professionals is, fundamentally, a distraction. The tragedy for all of us is that we find ourselves in a world where the qualities that define professional work—stability, social purpose, autonomy, and intrinsic and extrinsic rewards—are scarce. “In part, the blame falls on the corporate elite,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote back in 1989, “which demands ever more bankers and lawyers, on the one hand, and low-paid helots on the other.” These low-paid helots are now unpaid interns and networked amateurs. The rub is that over the intervening years we have somehow deceived ourselves into believing that this state of insecurity and inequity is a form of liberation.
Today it is standard wisdom that a whole new kind of person lives in our midst, the digital native—“2.0 people” as the novelist Zadie Smith dubbed them. Exalted by techno-enthusiasts for being hyper-connected and sociable, technically savvy and novelty seeking—and chastised by techno-skeptics for those very same traits—this new generation and its predecessors are supposedly separated by a gulf that is immense and unbroachable. Self-appointed experts tell us that “today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”; they “experience friendship” and “relate to information differently” than all who came before.1
Reflecting on this strange new species, the skeptics are inclined to agree. “The cyber-revolution is bringing about a different magnitude of change, one that marks a massive discontinuity,” warns the literary critic Sven Birkerts. “Pre-Digital Man has more in common with his counterpart in the agora than he will with a Digital Native of the year 2050.” It is not just cultural or social references that divide the natives from their pre-digital counterparts, but “core phenomenological understandings.” Their very modes of perception and sense making, of experiencing the world and interpreting it, Birkerts claims, are simply incomprehensible to their elders. They are different creatures altogether.2
The tech-enthusiasts make a similarly extreme case for total generational divergence, idolizing digital natives with fervor and ebullience equal and opposite