Who Owns the Future?

There are many articles and books addressing the vanishing middle class, but this was the first book I’ve read that examines the vanishing creative class. Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier (a dreadful dude) writes not about the economics of the situation but about cyber future. This blog has commented in the past on compensation and how most of what I write ends up as simply a byline or publishing cred=FREE CONTENT. If I absolutely needed to support myself on my art then I would have to retrain and NOT write.

Blame the Internet.

Lanier as well as anybody understands. Even as he criticizes the digitization of information/entertainment/all that is holy—he is getting paid by what he calls Super Sirens—or is it Siren Servers? That which giveth, taketh away.

The publishing industry will ultimately go the road of the music industry, the same road that flushed away the local bookstore and the superstore Borders that lays empty down the street from me. The blame just keeps getting bumped up. Who is gobbling up who (whom)? Someday only Google and Amazon will be left standing, left to fight a Hundred Year War for dominance or virtual audience.

I write this as even a couple weeks ago I launched an eBook. Even as I’m in the running for a job writing small for this—a job I read about on the Web at CAR (Chicago Artists Resource).

I need what will eventually kill me and all that I love.

All that free content is getting recognition, building an audience=just not cashing out. Though if everyone who reads my blog buys a copy of Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir I might be able to afford the permissions I had to pay out to Pantheon and FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX for the right to use copyrighted material. I don’t mind forking over $$ to these publishers even though my beloved James (Schuyler) won’t see any of it. I wonder who controls his estate since he had no offspring? Perhaps the friars at Little Portion Friary where his ashes are interned.

This to say that most of us do not live to see our due. Poor Vincent (Van Gogh)—more famous dead than alive.

So you can order WhoOwns the Future? from Amazon or second-hand or a bootleg ARC (advanced reader copy—that are often showing up on the ’net) where little to no royalties are recouped.

Because of the Internet I can self-publish, brand myself, blog tour, and not kill any trees. Yet it is a case of the snake swallowing its own tail—or tale.