Anne Truitt Zelenka

Johnnie Moore on enthusiasm (via James):

I found the original meaning of enthusiasm, from the Greek, was (my italics):

inspiration or possession by a divine afflatus or by the presence of a god

If you like, enthusiasm is about showing up in the here and now - a good way to counter anxiety, I find. You can invoke God according to your spiritual taste.

I’ve taken to suggesting that Web 2.0 may be creating a volunteer economy.

The volunteer economy is problematic, though, as is the enthusiasm economy. Unless you’re independently wealthy or living off someone else’s income, volunteerism can’t support you. Enthusiasm isn’t enough, by itself.

This picks up a theme from Time’s article Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free:

Clever entrepreneurs and even established companies can profit from this volunteerism–but only if they don’t get too greedy. The key, Benkler says, is “managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker.” In software, where IBM and other companies charge billions of dollars to install and run otherwise free Linux systems, this seems to be working–in part because Linux volunteers can make money from their expertise and there’s a clear understanding of what one can charge for.

So that works pretty well for the Linux programmers, but what about other parts of the so-called “gift economy”? Is it true that big companies are taking advantage of enthusiasm and volunteerism? How do you ensure that the volunteers don’t get treated like suckers?

I don’t think it’s particularly relevant whether a few people have made billions of dollars off of, for example, YouTube’s videos while other people are doing “work” for free. I don’t agree with Nick Carr’s characterizing this as digital sharecropping. Such a perspective seems to come naturally to those who are used to being compensated for their creativity and expressiveness, those who have easily found outlets for sharing ideas in the old economy. There was never any doubt that Nick Carr or Mike Arrington would find some sort of platform for what they wanted to do. They didn’t need a participatory, enthusiasm-based revolution for that.

That’s an aside that may not be totally relevant to what I’m trying to get at here: the uneasy linking of enthusiasm and money. We find some ways of making money via enthusiasm acceptable and some ways unacceptable. PayPerPost seems to make some people queasy while others see it as a way to fund their writing and consuming pastimes. Where you land on this question seems at least partly to depend on where you start from. Are you a privileged member of the media elite, given access to powerful people, offered travel and product freebies, and wooed so you’ll look favorably on whatever’s thrust before your critical gaze? Or are you just someone enthusastic about sharing your writing and your opinions, perhaps for a bit of money? If you are merely enthusiastic, you might find PayPerPost an interesting possibility. If you are privileged, you might feel that privilege at once threatened and exposed for what it is: a market-based transaction, one where you are selling your ideas and attention.

There is this fiction that somehow we are not for sale or should not be. And that’s where that story about the woman who’ll do it for a million but not for ten dollars comes in. When offered a million she hesitantly agrees but when the buyer offers instead ten dollars she asks, “what do you think I am?” He (it is always a he, isn’t it?) says, “we have already established what you are, now we are just haggling over the price.”

I find that story so annoying. It’s always a man asking a woman–and it’s fraught with all sorts of social gender-based rules. And it’s just dumb on some level. You could make graphs that showed how much a person valued their chastity and reputation compared to how much they needed or wanted the money. And what if the guy was really hot? I mean honestly: if I were single, I might sleep with a super-attractive guy for a ton of money or for no money but probably not for a little bit of money. Because what would sleeping with someone for a little bit of money make me? A whore. Draw a graph of that and you’ll start to see how the definition of whoring works.

So it all comes down to this: how do you define a whore. I guess you define one as somebody who sells themselves more cheaply than you’d be willing to sell yourself. And where you draw the line depends on the opportunities before you. So those that have tons of opportunities look at those that have only a few and think: “they are whoring themselves” because they’d never sell themselves for so little.

Sex aside, it’s important to consider where we’ve gotten ourselves. We previously put so many intermediaries into our commercial transactions that then when we start disintermediating we no longer have the etiquette or guidelines to know how to behave. Used to be that you’d go buy stuff from your neighbor the grocer or your other neighbor the butcher and they’d give you advice and they’d try to sell you stuff. You wouldn’t come home and complain to your spouse about them turning conversations into money.

How do we get back to a place where we can be authentic as ourselves and yet still do business together? Enthusiasm and volunteering don’t pay the bills, wanting to make money doesn’t mean we’re inauthentic or prostituting ourselves … what is the answer?