Monday February 22, 2010

Why They Cried: Day One

“Why They Cried: Ted”—the first part of a five-part series that will culminate in a Significant Objects auction on Friday—is now live at Fictionaut.

I want to take the chance this week to write a little bit about the Significant Objects project and why it seems particular interesting (to me, anyway) at this historical moment, when producers of all kinds are struggling to find ways to get people to pay anything for content. That’s not to say that SO-style auctions represent an alternative business model. Rather, they present a working model of meaning—and value—being created in a setting where we can ask, what the hell is going on here? What are people paying for when they purchase a Significant Object, and why is it missing (or is it actually missing?) from an MP3 or an e-book or an article in the New York Times.

First of all, let me say it’s a pleasure to, like, jam with Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn. I used to read Glenn’s Hermenaut when I was failing to get a Ph.D in philosophy at the University of Memphis in the mid-’90s—I didn’t know I was failing at the time, but that was just how it worked out—and I read Walker’s ad column at Slate when I was running the ad industry site AdCritic.com a decade later. That these two guys (the semiotician and the marketing critic) would get together might seem odd, until you realize how profoundly the rise of the Internet has re-raised fundamental questions of meaning and value—questions which philosophers and marketers alike are trying to solve. Don’t believe me? Pick up Chris Anderson’s Free, or its opposite number, Jaron Lanier’s new You Are Not a Gadget, and you’ll find books that cover material from Adam Smith to Amazon.com, from machinima to Marx. And as someone who has spent time contemplating both Derrida and DDB, I’m interested in these questions from both angles.

It was a few months ago when I really got it. I was eavesdropping on MediaBistro.com’s eBook Summit—via Tweetdeck, of course, for free—when it hit me how deeply publishing (widely construed, including books, magazines, newspapers, etc.) had lost the thread of its own survival. I say this not because I have the answers. (Yes, I’m one of those.) I say it, instead, because it’s breathtaking how quickly and completely the rug has been pulled out from under publishing. The rug cliché is apt here, too, since it really is an object that has been snatched out from underneath publishing, or—rather—objects in general have been snatched out from underneath it, throwing its entire market value into question. Which is funny, since it was never quite true that the value was contained in the objects in the first place. For physical newspapers and magazines, their cost is, at best, a usage fee or a circulation-control device, and for books, it has always been understood that the object itself is merely a container for the work, which itself is intangible. And, what’s more, we pay for intangibles all the time in form of brands and their cultural auras, the cost of which far exceed the value of the objects themselves. (One of the reasons I am a PC—not a Mac—is that while it might be true that Macs have more utility value than PCs, they also have more brand value tacked on. In other words, a far greater percentage of the cost of a Mac goes toward its aura, and I like to control aura expenditures. That said, I am an iPhone convert, which—at this point—has no rivals when it comes to utility.)

So although consumers pay for intangible values all the time—provided they inhere in objects—it has turned out to be difficult to persuade people to pay for these same values when they are freed from objects entirely. (When they are all bits and no atoms, to use Anderson’s formulation.) It’s as if you can’t charge anything if you don’t have an object to stick a price tag on.

Which is why I think Significant Objects is interesting. You won’t find many sites that pay $100 to $200 for flash fiction stories. But that’s what SO stories fetch once they’ve been attached, as it were, to objects. And it doesn’t much matter what the object is, it seems, as long as there is one, as though objects were the containers in which we still expect all meaning to be traded. Of course it’s somewhat more complicated than that. More tomorrow.

Click here for more information about Significant Objects and my contribution, “Why They Cried.”