Indie 2.0

Ok. So the single book I brought with me to India last week was Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch, which I wrote about 3 weeks ago and now apparently is high on the WSJ Business bestseller list (was high? Oddly, I can’t find it listed there today, so perhaps it just had a hot-selling week. But it is destined to become a bestseller.)

It’s a very important book. I’m 2/3s through and will write a review soon. One major punchline (my words, not Carr’s):

Computing will become a utility, just like electricity did. But electrification pulled the middle class up and more evenly distributed wealth. The “World Wide Computer” paradigm shift will do the opposite.

While I think I differ a little on causality, the trend toward less well-paid salaried jobs for knowledge/culture workers seems real and true. istockphoto.com killed the photo journalist. And today, for example, Anne Thompson at Variety writes on her blog about the layoff of the Village Voice film critic, Nathan Lee:

the fact that there could be more casualties to come signals the ongoing implosion of our shared profession, at least as far as print is concerned. Over at the The House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz predicts, “I think we’re fast approaching the point where criticism will become, for the most part, a devotion rather than a job.”

Here’s Carr’s take on the underlying phenomenon:

As user-generated content continues to be commercialized, it seems likely that the largest threat posed by social production won’t be to big corporations but to individual professionals–to the journalists, editors, photographers, researchers, analysts, librarians, and other information workers who can be replaced by, as Horowitz puts it, “people not on the payroll”….

In the YouTube economy, everyone is free to play, but only a few reap the rewards….

In general, articles on serious and complex subjects, from politics to wars to international affairs, will fail to generate attractive ad revenues….

We may find that the culture of abundance being produced by the World Wide Computer is really just a culture of mediocrity–many miles wide but only a fraction of an inch deep.

And thus, I fear, in a generation there won’t be any good and brave journalists of the caliber of Patrick Cockburn. It takes a lifetime of reading, writing, traveling and observing (mostly in war zones) to reach his level of intelligence, objectivity, thickness-of-skin, strength of character and wisdom. A lifetime salary no one is willing to pay any more, thus we’ll all be more in the dark–despite the new grid….

Carr’s book is an important antidote to all the pervasive boosterism and pollyannishness about Web 2.0 (often written by those pretending to be in the new rich digerati but who are, in fact, victims of pauperization by same Cloud they praise…)