Spike Jones wrote:... Pay Pal might be used as Eliezer has
> suggested to send someone a buck if you like their site. I
> mentioned some months ago a guy who was an expert in
> transmissions, who wrote and posted articles thereon, and
> said he would continue to do so as long as he got enough
> donations in the mail to make it worth his time. I havent
> checked to see if he is still there. spike
OK I checked, and I cannot find him. He might still be
there somewhere, but as it turns out one can query a
search engine these days on ford + transmission + truck
for instance and have many of the hits be ads for porno sites
with a long list of decoy words up front.
What I am looking for is a *new* way to pay the
artists, musicians, writers, software developers, etc,
that does not depend on a middleman marketer who
ends up devouring a disproportionate share of the
profit. I am looking for a way the writer can go
directly to the reading public, and let them decide
if a work is worth reading or buying. The canonical
example is Kerouac's On The Road. Many publishers
did not want it, finally it was hailed as perhaps the
best American novel of the 1950s. Jack should be
given some means of letting the public be the jury,
not the publisher, and should be paid by the public,
not at the whim of a middleman.
Im open to suggestion here. I can assure you however,
if we depend only on writers who are self motivated,
we will end up with a body of literature which is as
free of content as it is cost.
Furthermore, I do suggest a totally *new* system, for
we are coming to realize more every day that presenting
information as ink on dead trees is itself a crippleware
version of that information. Eliezer's comment was
quite appropriate: this is not information, it is a *picture* of
information.
The fires in the library at Alexandria burn brightly. Any
information that is not currently going into ASCII files
that can somehow be archived and referenced, might
as well be flaming with the ancient Greek scrolls. I suspect
today we would find ever fewer doing what I used to do
in high school and college: wandering the library arbitrarily
devouring information found in dusty old books. Today
it must be in electronic form, for eventually the singularity
will have informational input demands that cannot be met
using woodpulp.
However, we must *still* figure out some way to reward
those who produce real content, anything other than porno
spam and jesus memes. Otherwise the post singularity
AI may well conclude that humanity and all its work is
really not worth preserving. I think we can do it, I just
do not know how. spike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:35:18 MDT