It is no secret that Trey Parker and Mat Stone (the producers of South Park) are libertarians. But when they discuss their libertarian philosophy through this medium it is normally a discussion of civil liberties. I have cable and usually watch the show On-Demand and recently watched an older show called Canada On Strike. It was a parody of the Writers’ Strike in Hollywood a while back. It was also parody of some basic economic fallacies.
Near the end, Kyle breaks out of character and remarks:
“Yeah, but you know, I learned something today. We thought we could make money on the Internet. But, while the Internet is new and exciting for creative people, it hasn’t matured as a distribution mechanism to the extent that one should trade real and immediate opportunities for income for the promise of future online revenue. It will be a few years before digital distribution of media on the Internet can be monetized to the extent that necessitates content producers to forego their fair value in more traditional media.”
I think what he means by mature, is that content creators don’t have a ready-set-go mechanism such as playing a club, or a magazine printing their article, or such ready to take content and monetize it for consumption.
But I think he is missing the larger point, that it’s not a question of maturity. It’s about whether the internet as a platform promotes the static institutional methods of past marketing. I would say no. At this point, the internet is becoming more fluid, more decentralized.
Many great writers, musicians, creators are lousy marketers. In my experience, a lot of them are focused more on the product than on the consumer. Hence the notion of “fair value”. Fair value is created by satisfying consumer demand, not by getting the labour value of your creation multiplied by a factor of X for perpetual wealth.
True, and the more people would LOVE to have a job in a particular occupation the larger the labor pool for that occupation and therefore the harder it is to make a living doing it. There are very wealthy athletes but those are only the crème of the crop. They are the best of the best of the best in that particular sport. There are far more amateur athletes who don’t make a dime from playing golf, baseball, basketball etc..
This isn’t atypical of infrastrucutre changes though, and partially what contributed to the dot-com bust… but that also let a better distribution mechanism; Web 2.0, take over. I would also caution overspeculation in this though because the tech is changing so fast.
This isn’t atypical of infrastrucutre changes though, and partially what contributed to the dot-com bust… but that also let a better distribution mechanism; Web 2.0, take over. I would also caution overspeculation in this though because the tech is changing so fast.