Cory Doctorow: Creating Value Through Celebrity

Once again, I find myself feeling uneasy about Cory Doctorow. I just read his article Macropayments in Locus Magazine online. In it he argues that using 'micropayments' for buying creative works online doesn't really work because (a) the transaction processing costs can't be brought down low enough, (b) there is a step-function in the buyer's mind between 'free' and 'not-free', and (c) if it is the artist themselves charging the micropayment, it changes the relationship between artist and audience in undesirable ways. Instead, he appears to be advocating a system of commercial intermediaries – such as already exist today (e.g. a publisher who sits between artist and buyer and does all the selling.) On the other hand, 'in an ideal world' as he says, there might be a graded commercial relationship between artist and customer which starts with giving the artist's work away for free as downloads but which begins to incur costs as the work is embodied (in print, or on disc, or whatever) and then grows more expensive as various value-added features are added ('deluxe' packaging, additional content, the artist's signature, and so on). Presumably all of this is done through a commercial intermediary too.

The problem with Doctorow is that, while I tend to agree with just about everything he says (and while I think he is a good and entertaining writer of non-fiction and fiction) I always feel he has pulled off some kind of sleight of hand in getting my agreement. I'm not certain I've discovered quite what it is yet but it is something like this: what Cory Doctorow says is true for Cory Doctorow and for people like him, but not for the great mass of artists.

In the kind of economy Doctorow promotes for artists, the works of art themselves are effectively valueless. It is only the packaging and the additional content that make them worth shelling out money for. I've struggled with why this seems so wrong to me, despite how convincing his arguments are, and I think I may have found the heart of it. This kind of economy only works when the artist is also a celebrity. This is why the artist's signature adds value. This is why you give away your work for nothing but charge high fees for public speaking engagements. Specifically, it means that in the world he envisages writers must become like rock stars and film stars. Their persons must become a cult, they must have fans, their lives must become the real product so that they can add value to the intrinsically worthless writing they produce.

Is this really the direction we want writing to take? Do we any longer have a choice?