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The Real New Economy Yesterday Dave made an extremely important good point about the tip jar compensation system. I'm interested in earning money, not having it given as a gratuity, he said. Whoa. If tipping has come to represent volunteer payment for Web "content," we have big problem here. We're suggesting, metaphorically, an 85% discount on our goods. I think we got both a problem and a solution last June, when we were inspired by these paragraphs from Courtney Love's famous speech: I'm looking for people to help connect me to more fans, because I believe fans will leave a tip based on the enjoyment and service I provide. I'm not scared of them getting a preview. It really is going to be a global village where a billion people have access to one artist and a billion people can leave a tip if they want to. It's a radical democratization. Every artist has access to every fan and every fan has access to every artist, and the people who direct fans to those artists. People that give advice and technical value are the people we need. People crowding the distribution pipe and trying to ignore fans and artists have no value. This is a perfect system. I just checked Google to see if I could find more about the Tip Jar System meme, and ... uh oh: it looks like I had some influence here. The meme may be out of control now, but I hope not, because we have to stop it. We need a new conversation about value and compensation. And we have to watch our metaphors. Tipping is a terrible metaphor. So is charity. When I pay KQED Radio for the goods I receive from them on the radio, I'n not making a "donation," or worse, leaving a "tip." I am paying for goods recieved.The fact that my payment is not coerced makes it no less a payment and no less valuable. I am fulfilling a social contract. There are a load of new social contracts being made these days, and Weblogs are going to take the lead in talking about it. We can't help it. Weblogs are the bazaar at work, big time. It's markets like they used to be, and are becoming again. It's clearer than ever that there's an old economy, a market-as-bazaar economy, that's coming back. This is an economy where supply and demand have equal power. They have no choice but to talk about what makes goods valuable, how much money they are worth, and how customers pay for them. Here again, as we did for ten thousand years before Supply got control and institutionalized the price tag, we are discovering value inside a conversation. This isn't just about negotiation, though that may be part of it. It's about connoisseurship. Judgement. Appreciation. And finally, exchange. The real New Economy is the recovery of the old economy — the one that we forgot when Industry won the Industrial Revolution. Craft lost that one. It happened too many generations ago for any of us to remember, but it was real and the winners got to write the history, memorializing the machinery of Industry and demeaning its opponents, from the Luddites to the Green Party. Industry wasn't bad, it was just skewed. It gave us economic metaphors that were all about shipping. Business was about adding value along a chain that ran from Production to Consumption. It was about delivering goods. Craft was about sharing, especially when it involved public performances, as with music. But craft was also about exchange. It still is. So here we are again. This stuff we're doing... what's it worth? For a few years we were distracted from this conversation by wishful billions of investment money, pouring into countless new businesses whose purposes were unavoidably those of its funders: to drive up perceived value and flip it for cash on the stock market. This motivation, and its successes, inflated a huge bubble that burst in Y2K. (It was the real "Y2K problem.") Sorry if you lost money in that one. So did I. But thank God (and gravity) that it's over. So let's talk about it. We've got an economy to build here. Shipping mentality won't help, but neither will donation mentality. Gives a whole new meaning to Swiss watch Project your message to Davos. Literally. Thanks to bix for that one.
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