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Not that many years ago, Laura Poitras was living in Yemen, alone, waiting. She had rented a house close to the home of Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard and the man she hoped would be the subject of her next documentary. He put her off when she asked to film him, remaining frustratingly elusive. Next week, he’d tell her, next week, hoping the persistent American would just go away.

“I was going through hell,” Poitras said, sitting in her office a few months after the premiere of her movie The Oath, the second in her trilogy of documentaries about foreign policy and national security after September 11. “I just didn’t know if it was going to be two years, ten years, you know?” She waited, sure there was a story to be told and that it was extraordinary, but not sure if she’d be allowed to tell it. As those agonizing months dragged on, she did her best to be productive and pursued other leads. During Ramadan Poitras was invited to the house of a man just released from Guantánamo, whom she hoped to interview. “People almost had a heart attack that I was there,” Poitras recounts. “I didn’t film. I was shut down, and I was sat with the women. They were like, ‘Aren’t you afraid that they’re going to cut your head off?’”

Bit by bit Abu Jandal opened up. Poitras would go home with only three or four hours of footage, but what she caught on tape was good enough to keep her coming back, a dozen times in all. “I think it probably wasn’t until a year into it that I felt that I was going to get a film,” Poitras said. A year of waiting, patience, uprootedness, and uncertainty before she knew that her work would come to anything.

With the support of PBS and a variety of grants, The Oath took almost three years to make, including a solid year in the editing room. The film’s title speaks of two pledges: one made by Jandal and others in al-Qaeda’s inner circle promising loyalty to bin Laden and another made by an FBI agent named Ali Soufan, who interrogated Abu Jandal when he was captured by U.S. forces. “Soufan was able to extract information without using violence,” Poitras has said, and he testified to Congress against violent interrogation tactics. “One of his reasons is because he took an oath to the Constitution. In a broad sense, the film is about whether these men betrayed their loyalties to their oaths.”¹

“I always think, whenever I finish a film, that I would never have done that if I had known what it would cost emotionally, personally.” The emotional repercussions of disturbing encounters can be felt long after the danger has passed; romantic relationships are severed by distance; the future is perpetually uncertain. Poitras, however, wasn’t complaining. She experiences her work as a gift, a difficult process but a deeply satisfying one, and was already busy planning her next project, about the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of the war on terror.

In January 2013 she was contacted by an anonymous source that turned out to be Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower preparing to make public a trove of documents revealing the National Security Administration’s massive secret digital surveillance program. He had searched Poitras out, certain that she was someone who would understand the scope of the revelations and the need to proceed cautiously. Soon she was on a plane to Hong Kong to shoot an interview that would shake the world and in the middle of another film that would take her places she never could have predicted at the outset.²

No simple formula explains the relationship between creative effort and output, nor does the quantity of time invested in a project correlate in any clear way to quality—quality being, of course, a slippery and subjective measure in itself. We can appreciate obvious skill, such as the labor of musicians who have devoted decades to becoming masters of their form, but it’s harder to assess work that is more subjective, more oblique, or less polished.

Complex creative labor—the dedicated application of human effort to some expressive end—continues despite technological innovation, stubbornly withstanding the demand for immediate production in an economy preoccupied with speed and cost cutting. We should hardly be surprised: aesthetic and communicative impulses are, by their very nature, indifferent to such priorities. A vase isn’t any more useful for being elaborately glazed. Likewise, a film is not necessarily any more informative for its demanding production qualities. We can’t reduce the contents of a novel to a summary of the plot, nor whittle down philosophical insight to a sound bite without something profound being lost along the way.

Cultural work, which is enhanced by the unpredictability of the human touch and the irregular rhythms of the imagination and intelligence, defies conventional measures of efficiency. Other trades were long ago deprived of this breathing room, the singular skill of the craftsperson automated away by the assembly line, much as the modern movement in architecture, to take one of many possible examples, has cut back on hand-finished flourishes in favor of standardized parts and designs.

For better or worse, machines continue to encroach on once protected territory. Consider the innovations aimed to optimize intrinsically creative processes—software engineered to translate texts, monitor the emotional tone of e-mails, perform research, recommend movies and books, “to make everything that’s implicit in a writer’s skill set explicit to a machine,” as an executive of one start-up describes its effort.³ Algorithms designed to analyze and intensify the catchiness of songs are being used to help craft and identify potential Top 40 hits. These inventions, when coupled with steadily eroding economic support for arts and culture, underscore the fact that no human activity is immune to the relentless pressure to enlist technology to the cause of efficiency and increased productivity.⁴

The problem isn’t with technology or efficiency, per se. Efficiency can be a remarkable thing, as in nature where nothing is wasted, including waste itself, which nurtures soil and plant and animal life. But the kind of efficiency to which techno-evangelists aspire emphasizes standardization, simplification, and speed, not diversity, complexity, and interdependence. And efficiency often masquerades as a technically neutral concept when it is in fact politically charged.

Instead of connoting the best use of scarce resources to attain a valued end, efficiency has become a code word promoting markets and competition over the public sphere, and profitability above all.⁵ Music, author and engineer Christopher Steiner predicts in Automate This, will become more homogenized as executives increasingly employ bots to hunt for irresistible hooks. “Algorithms may bring us new artists, but because they build their judgment on what was popular in the past, we will likely end up with some of the same kind of forgettable pop we already have.”⁶

There’s no denying the benefits the arts have reaped from technological innovation. Writing is a technology par excellence, one that initially aroused deep distrust and suspicion. Likewise, the book is a tool so finely honed to suit human need that we mistake it for something eternal and immutable.⁷ Every musical instrument—from the acoustic guitar to the timpani to synthesizers—is a contrived contraption. Without advances in chemistry and optics we would have no photography; without turntables, no hip-hop. I owe my career as a documentarian to the advent of digital video. New inventions make unimaginable art possible. No doubt, with emerging technologies, we stand on the brink of expressive forms still inconceivable.

Nonetheless, the arts do not benefit from technological advancement in the way other industries do: a half century ago it took pretty much the same amount of time and labor to compose a novel, produce a play, or conduct an orchestra as it takes today. Even with the aid of a computer and access to digital archives, the task of researching and constructing, say, a historical narrative remains obstinately demanding. For filmmakers the costs of travel, payments to crew, and money to support time in the field and the editing room persist despite myriad helpful innovations. Technology may enable new expressive forms and distribution may be cheaper than in the past, but the process of making things remains, in many fundamental respects, unchanged. The arts, to use the language of cultural economics, depend on a type of labor input that cannot be replaced by new technologies and capital.

In the mid-sixties, two Princeton economists, William Baumol and William Bowen, made the groundbreaking argument that economic growth actually creates a “cost disease” where labor-intensive creative productions are concerned, the relative cost of the arts increasing in comparison to other manufactured goods. Baumol and Bowen’s analysis focused specifically on live performance, but their basic insight is applicable to any practice that demands human ingenuity and effort that cannot be made more efficient or eliminated through technological innovation. (Explaining Baumol and Bowen’s dilemma in the New Yorker, James Surowiecki notes that there are, in effect, two economies in existence, one that is becoming more productive while the other isn’t. In the first camp, we have the economy of computer manufacturing, carmakers, and Walmart bargains; in the second, the economy of undergraduate colleges, hair salons, auto repair, and the arts. “Cost disease isn’t anyone’s fault … It’s just endemic to businesses that are labor-intensive,” Surowiecki explains.)⁸

To put it in the jargon proper to the economic analysis, the arts suffer from a “productivity lag,” where productivity is defined as physical output per work hour. Baumol and Bowen’s famous example is a string quartet: today it takes the same number of people the same amount of time to perform a composition by Mozart as it did in the 1800s, a fact that yields an exasperating flat line next to the skyward surge of something like computer manufacturing, which has seen productivity increases of 60 percent per year. “That the tendency for costs to rise and for prices to lag behind is neither a matter of bad luck nor mismanagement,” Baumol and Bowen explain in their seminal study. “Rather, it is an inescapable result of the technology of live performance, which will continue to contribute to the widening of the income gaps of the performing organizations.”

Analyzing the predicament faced by the labor-intensive arts, they hypothesized two cures to the cost disease. The first remedy was social subsidy, and in fact their work played an important role in energizing the push for increased funding for cultural institutions in the United States. The second cure was tied to a more general economic prediction, one infused with the optimism of the era. It may be the unfortunate fate of the arts to stagnate in terms of productivity growth, Baumol and Bowen maintained, but increased productivity in other sectors would help buoy creators. In their view, rising wages and—more important—an increase in free time would give the American people ample opportunities to create and enjoy art.⁹

In a digital age, however, art and culture face a core contradiction, since copies can be made with the push of a button. Like the live performances Baumol and Bowen discuss, most creative endeavors have high fixed costs. While the hundredth or thousandth or millionth digital copy of Poitras’s first documentary, My Country, My Country, about a Sunni family trying to survive in war-torn Iraq, costs virtually nothing, the first copy cost her nearly four hundred thousand dollars.

When copies can be made and distributed across the globe in an instant, the logic of supply and demand pushes the price down to nothing. Yet when human imagination and exertion are essential to the creative process, the cost of cultural production only rises. It’s a paradox that cannot be wished away. Baumol and Bowen identified “an ever-increasing gap” between the operating costs of labor-intensive creative products and their earned income. In a digital economy, this gap becomes a yawning cavern.

To new-media utopians, monetary concerns are irrelevant. In recent years a bevy of popular technologists, scholars, and commentators have united to paint an appealing picture of a future where the cultural field, from entertainment to academia, is remade as a result of digital technologies that allow individuals to create and collaborate at no cost. Before the Internet, the story goes, people needed to be part of a massive bureaucracy and have a big budget to do something like make a movie. Now anyone with a mobile phone can shoot a video and upload it to a global distribution platform. Before the Internet, a small number of specialists were hired to compose an encyclopedia. Now volunteers scattered across the globe can create one more comprehensive than any the world has ever known. And so on.

An amateur paradise is upon us, a place where people are able to participate in cultural production for the pleasure of it, without asking permission first. Social media have enabled a new paradigm of collaboration. The old closed, hierarchical, institutional model is being replaced by a decentralized, networked system open to all. Barriers to entry have been removed, gatekeepers have been demolished, and the costs of creating and distributing culture have plummeted. New tools not only have made cultural production more efficient but have equalized opportunity.

NYU professor Clay Shirky, perhaps the leading proponent of this view, calls this process “social production.” Harvard’s Yochai Benkler uses the term “peer production,” business writer Jeff Howe calls it “crowdsourcing,” and Don Tapscott and his coauthor Anthony D. Williams say “wikinomics.” Whatever term they use, the commentators agree that a revolution is unfolding, with the potential to transform not just culture but also politics and the economy. They put social production on a pedestal, holding it up as more egalitarian, ethical, and efficient than the old model it is said to supersede.

Tapping the deep vein of American populism, new-media thinkers portray the amateur ethos flourishing online as a blow against the elitism and exclusivity of the professions, their claims to expertise and authority, and the organizations they depend on, and there’s something appealing about this view.¹⁰ The professional class is not blameless by any means: it has erected often arbitrary barriers in the form of credentialing and licensing and has often failed to advance the public good while securing its own position.

The professions, as many others have observed, have served as a kind of “class fortress,” excluding talented, motivated people in service of monopolistic self-preservation. (“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution” is known in tech circles as the Shirky principle.) It is this aspect of professionalism that outrages Internet apostles, who celebrate the liberation from professionals who claim special knowledge and cheer the fact that authority is shifting from “faraway offices to the network of people we know, like, and respect.”¹¹

More far-reaching, mass amateurization is said to reveal something profound about human nature. Social media, enthusiasts contend, prove that long-dominant assumptions were wrong. The abundance of user-generated content, no matter how silly or derivative, reveals an intrinsic creative drive. While most of us probably didn’t need the Internet to show us that human beings share an irrepressible urge to create and share—an “art instinct”—for some this truism is a revelation.

It follows, by this logic, that if people are intrinsically motivated to produce culture, and technology enables them to act on this motivation effortlessly and affordably and without financial reward, then amateurs are less compromised than compensated professionals and thus superior. “Amateurs,” Shirky writes, “are sometimes separated from professionals by skill, but always by motivation; the term itself derives from the Latin amare—‘to love.’ The essence of amateurism is intrinsic motivation: to be an amateur is to do something for the love of it.”

Making a similar case, Yochai Benkler likens cultural creation to blood drives: the quality of donations increases when organizers stop paying.¹² “Remember, money isn’t always the best motivator,” Benkler said, reiterating the point during a TED Talk touching on similar themes. “If you leave a fifty-dollar check after dinner with friends, you don’t increase the probability of being invited back. And if dinner isn’t entirely obvious, think of sex.”¹³

So it won’t matter if some people’s operating costs end up exceeding their earned income. A well-received academic monograph about the impact of online file sharing on music production, published under the auspices of Harvard Business School, echoes these insights, allaying any suspicion one might have that lack of income could inhibit the world’s creative output. The authors argue that a decline in “industry profitability” won’t hurt production because artists’ unique motivations will keep them churning out music even if they are operating at a loss. “The remuneration of artistic talent differs from other types of labor in at least two important respects. On the one hand, artists often enjoy what they do, suggesting they might continue being creative even when the monetary incentives to do so become weaker. In addition, artists receive a significant portion of their remuneration not in monetary form.” To quote the professors, “many of them enjoy fame, admiration, social status, and free beer in bars.”¹⁴

Another paper, published with the romantic title “Money Ruins Everything,” comes to a similar conclusion. Its authors, a team of social scientists, were stunned by what they found online: throngs of people who, instead of engaging in cost-benefit analysis, “produce content for the love of it, for the joy of expressing themselves, because it is fun, to demonstrate that they are better at it than others, or for a host of other non-commercial motivations.” The very existence of creators who “produce content for the love of it and are prepared to work for free—or even to lose money to feed their desire to create” upends traditional models of media production. If you want insight into the culture of the future, they say, just look at Wikipedia, the open source software community, and popular photo-sharing services. There are millions of people who contribute user-generated content without promise of remuneration or reward.

This distinction between love and money seems self-evident and uncomplicated. If the choice is between a powerful record mogul and a teenager uploading a video of himself singing in his bedroom, or the inanity of a high-grossing nightly cable news host versus some insightful commentary on a personal Web site, who wouldn’t side with the little person? But the distinction is deceptive. What sounds like idealism, upon further reflection, reveals itself to be the opposite. For one thing, it is deeply cynical to deny professionals any emotional investment in their work. Can we really argue that creative professionals—filmmakers, writers, architects, graphic designers, and so on—do not care deeply about what they do? And what about doctors, teachers, and scientists?

The corollary of Benkler’s and Shirky’s argument is that only those who despise their work deserve to be paid for their efforts.¹⁵ It’s worth pointing out that these men—despite their enthusiasm for social production—release their books with conventional publishers and hold positions at elite academic institutions. Surely they do not believe their work as professional writers, researchers, and teachers is suspect because they were compensated. There is a note of truth in the idea that adversity fuels creativity, but when reduced to an economic truism—a decline in industry profitability won’t hurt artistic production because artists will work for beer—the notion rings not just hollow but obscene.

These tidily opposed categories of professional and amateur are ones into which few actually existing creative people perfectly fit. And the consequences of the digital upheaval are far more equivocal than the Shirkys and Benklers acknowledge. While the economics of the Web might apply to remixing memes or posting in online forums, the costs and risks associated with creative acts that require leaving one’s computer have hardly collapsed.

Where will this new paradigm leave projects like The Oath? Following Shirky’s logic, Laura Poitras is one of those professionals who should be overthrown by noble amateurs, her labor-intensive filmmaking process a throwback to another era, before creativity was a connected, collective process. The Internet might be a wonderful thing, but you can’t crowdsource a relationship with a terrorist or a whistle-blower.

Makers of art and culture have long straddled two economies, the economy of the gift and the economy of the market, as Lewis Hyde elegantly demonstrated in his book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Unlike other resources, Hyde explained, culture is passed from person to person, between whom it forms “feeling-bonds,” an initiation or preservation of affection. A simple purchase, on the other hand, forges no necessary connection, as any interaction at a cash register makes clear. Thus culture is a gift, a kind of glue, a covenant, but one that, unlike barter, obliges nothing in return. In other words, the fruits of creative effort exist to be shared. Yet the challenge is how to support this kind of work in a market-based society. “Invariably the money question comes up,” writes Hyde. “Labors such as mine are notoriously non-remunerative, and your landlord is not interested in your book of translations the day your rent comes due.”

The fate of creative people is to exist in two incommensurable realms of value and be torn between them—on one side, the purely economic activity associated with the straightforward selling of goods or labor; on the other, the fundamentally different, elevated form of value we associate with art and culture. It is this dilemma that led Baudelaire to ruefully proclaim that the “prostitution of the poet” was “an unavoidable necessity.”

Yet the challenge of maintaining oneself in a world of money is hardly a problem unique to the creatively inclined. This dilemma may not trouble those who choose to pursue wealth above all else, but most people seek work that feeds both the spirit and the belly. Likewise, the cultural realm is not the only sphere in which some essential part cannot be bought or sold. Teaching, therapy, medicine, science, architecture, design, even politics and law when practiced to serve the public good—certainly the gift operates within these fields as well. The gift can even be detected in supposedly menial jobs where people, in good faith, do far more than meager wages require of them. Creative people are not the only ones who struggle desperately to balance the contradictory demands of the gift and the market. But culture is the domain where this quandary is often most visible and acknowledged. Culture is one stage on which we play out our anxieties about the impact of market values on our inner lives. As we transition to a digital age, this anxiety is in full view.

The supposed conflict between amateurs and professionals sparked by the Internet speaks to a deep and long-standing confusion about the relationship between work and creativity in our society. Artists, we imagine, are grasshoppers, singing while ants slog away—or butterflies: delicate and flighty creatures who, stranded in a beehive, have the audacity to demand honey. No matter how exacting or extensive the effort a project requires, if the process allows for some measure of self-realization, it’s not unpleasant or self-sacrificing enough to fit our conception of work as drudgery. We tend to believe that the labor of those who appear to love what they do does not by definition qualify as labor.

We have succumbed, as the essayist Rebecca Solnit put it to me, to the “conventionalized notion of work as the forty hours of submission to another’s purpose snipped out of your life (and leaving a hole in your heart and mind).” Along the way we ignore the fact that many people, not only members of the vaunted “professional” class, love their jobs. “A lot of builders and firemen really enjoy themselves. Bakers and cooks can be pretty happy, and so can some farmers and fishermen.” Nor should we romanticize creative labor, she noted: “Most artists don’t love all parts of their work—I hate all the administration, the travel, the bad posture, the excess solitude, and the uncertainty about my own caliber and my future.”

In the 1951 classic White Collar, sociologist C. Wright Mills presented a powerful alternative to the stark dichotomies of amateurs versus professionals. Examining the emerging category of office worker, Mills advocated, instead, for what he called the Renaissance view of work, a process that would allow for not only the creation of objects but the development of the self—an act both mental and manual that “confesses and reveals” us to the world. The problem, as Mills saw it, was that development of the self was trivialized into “hobbies”—they were being amateurized, in other words—and so relegated to the lesser realm of leisure as opposed to the realm of legitimate labor.¹⁶

“Each day men sell little pieces of themselves in order to try to buy them back each night and week end with the coin of fun,” wrote Mills, despairing of a cycle that splits us in two: an at-work self and an at-play self, the person who produces for money and the person who produces for love.¹⁷ New-media thinkers believe social production and amateurism transcend the old problem of alienated labor by allowing us to work for love, not money, but in fact the unremunerated future they anticipate will only deepen a split that many desperately desire to reconcile.

Innovations and invention were expected to bring about humankind’s inevitable release from alienated labor. The economist John Maynard Keynes once predicted that the four-hour workday was close at hand and that technical improvements in manufacturing would allow ample time for people to focus on “the art of life itself.” Into the 1960s experts agonized over the possibility of a “crisis of leisure time,” which they prophesized would sweep the country—a crisis precipitated not for want of time off but by an excess of it.

In 1967, testimony before a Senate subcommittee indicated that “by 1985 people could be working just 22 hours a week or 27 weeks a year or could retire at 38.” Over the ensuing decades countless people have predicted that machines would facilitate the “end of work” by automating drudgery and freeing humans to perform labor they enjoy (“Let the robots take the jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters,” concludes one Wired cover story rehashing this old idea).¹⁸

New-media thinkers do not pretend this future has come to pass, but in Cognitive Surplus Clay Shirky presents what can be read as a contemporary variation on this old theme, explaining how the cumulative free time of the world’s educated population—an estimated trillion hours a year—is being funneled into creative, collaborative projects online.¹⁹ Time is something Shirky claims we have a growing abundance of thanks to two factors: steadily increasing prosperity and a decline of television viewing. The Web, he argues, challenges us to stop thinking of time as “individual minutes to be whiled away” and imagine it, instead, as a “social asset that can be harnessed.”²⁰

Projects like Wikipedia, message boards, and the latest viral memes are creative paradigms for a new age: entertaining, inclusive, easy to make, and efficient—the accumulation of tidbits of attention from thousands of people around the world. Much of the art and culture of the future, he wagers, will be produced in a similar manner, by pooling together spare moments spent online. Our efforts shall be aggregated, all the virtual crumbs combining to make a cake. Institutions will be supplanted as a consequence of the deployment of this surplus.²¹

Shirky’s contributions reveal not how far we’ve progressed in pursuit of “the art of life” but how much ground has been lost since Keynes, how our sense of what’s possible has been circumscribed despite the development of new, networked wonders. Today’s popular visionary imagines us hunched over our computers with a few idle minutes to spare, our collective clicks supposed to substitute for what was once the promise of personal creative development—the freedom to think, feel, create, and act with the whole of one’s being.

In addition to other problematic aspects of his argument, Shirky’s two foundational assertions—that television watching is down and that free time has increased over recent decades—are both unfounded. Despite competition from the Internet, television viewing has generally risen over recent years, with the average American taking in nearly five hours of video each day, 98 percent through a traditional TV set. “Americans,” a 2012 Nielsen report states, “are not turning off.”²²

According to economists, with the exception of those who suffer from under- and unemployment, work hours have actually risen. Those lucky enough to be fully employed are, in fact, suffering from “time impoverishment.” Today the average citizen works longer hours for less money than he or she once did, putting in an extra four and a half weeks a year compared to 1979. Married couples with children are on the job an extra 413 hours, or an extra ten weeks a year, combined.²³Adding salt to the wounds, the United States is the only industrialized nation where employers are not required by law to provide workers any paid vacation time.²⁴

The reason the prophecies of Mills and Keynes never came to pass is obvious but too often overlooked: new technologies do not emerge in a vacuum free of social, political, and economic influences. Context is all-important. On their own, labor-saving machines, however ingenious, are not enough to bring about a society of abundance and leisure, as the Luddites who destroyed the power looms set to replace them over two centuries ago knew all too well. If we want to see the fruits of technological innovation widely shared, it will require conscious effort and political struggle. Ultimately, outcomes are shaped as much by the capabilities of new technologies as by the wider circumstances in which they operate.

Baumol and Bowen, for example, made their rosy predictions against the backdrop of a social consensus now in tatters. When they wrote their report in the sixties, the prevailing economic orthodoxy said that both prosperity and risk should be broadly spread. Health care, housing, and higher education were more accessible to more people than they had ever been. Bolstered by a strong labor movement, unemployment was low and wages high by today’s standards. There was talk of shortened workweeks and guaranteed annual income for all. As a consequence of these conditions, men and women felt emboldened to demand more than just a stable, well-compensated job; they wanted work that was also engaging and gratifying.

In the fifties and sixties, this wish manifested in multiple ways, aiming at the status quo from within and without. First came books like The Organization Man and The Lonely Crowd, which voiced widespread anxieties about the erosion of individuality, inwardness, and agency within the modern workplace. Company men revolted against the “rat race.” Conformity was inveighed against, mindless acquiescence condemned, and affluence denounced as an anesthetic to authentic experience. Those who stood poised to inherit a gray flannel suit chafed against its constraints. By 1972 blue-collar workers were fed up, too, with wildcat strikers at auto factories protesting the monotony of the assembly line. The advances of technology did not, in the end, liberate the worker from drudgery but rather further empowered those who owned the machines. By the end of the 1970s, as former labor secretary Robert Reich explains,

a wave of new technologies (air cargo, container ships and terminals, satellite communications and, later, the Internet) had radically reduced the costs of outsourcing jobs abroad. Other new technologies (automated machinery, computers, and ever more sophisticated software applications) took over many other jobs (remember bank tellers? telephone operators? service station attendants?). By the ’80s, any job requiring that the same steps be performed repeatedly was disappearing—going over there or into software.²⁵

At the same time the ideal of a “postindustrial society” offered the alluring promise of work in a world in which goods were less important than services. Over time, phrases like “information economy,” “immaterial labor,” “knowledge workers,” and “creative class” slipped into everyday speech. Mental labor would replace the menial; stifling corporate conventions would give way to diversity and free expression; flexible employment would allow them to shape their own lives.

These prognostications, too, were not to be. Instead the increase of shareholder influence in the corporate sector accelerated the demand for ever-higher returns on investment and shorter turnaround. Dismissing stability as the refusal to innovate (or rather cut costs), business leaders cast aspersions on the steadying tenets of the first half of the twentieth century, including social provisions and job security. Instead of lifetime employment, the new system valorized adaptability, mobility, and risk; in the place of full-time employment, there were temporary contracts and freelance instability. In this context, the wish for expressive, worthwhile work, the desire to combine employment and purpose, took on a perverse form.

New-media thinkers, with their appetite for disintermediation and creative destruction, implicitly endorse and advance this transformation. The crumbling and hollowing out of established cultural institutions, from record labels to universities, and the liberation of individuals from their grip is a fantasy that animates discussions of amateurism. New technologies are hailed for enabling us to “organize without organizations,” which are condemned as rigid and suffocating and antithetical to the open architecture of the Internet.

However, past experience shows that the receding of institutions does not necessarily make space for a more authentic, egalitarian existence: if work and life have been made more flexible, people have also become unmoored, blown about by the winds of the market; if old hierarchies and divisions have been overthrown, the price has been greater economic inequality and instability; if the new system emphasizes potential and novelty, past achievement and experience have been discounted; if life has become less predictable and predetermined, it has also become more precarious as liability has shifted from business and government to the individual. It turns out that what we need is not to eliminate institutions but to reinvent them, to make them more democratic, accountable, inclusive, and just.

More than anyone else, urbanist Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, has built his career as a flag-bearer for the idea that individual ingenuity can fill the void left by declining institutions. Like new-media thinkers, with whom he shares a boundless admiration for all things high tech and Silicon Valley, he also shuns “organizational or institutional directives” while embracing the values meritocracy and openness. In Florida’s optimistic view, the demise of career stability has unbridled creativity and eliminated alienation in the workplace. “To some degree, Karl Marx had it partly right when he foresaw that the workers would someday control the means of production,” Florida declares. “This is now beginning to happen, although not as Marx thought it would, with the proletariat rising to take over factories. Rather, more workers than ever control the means of production, because it is inside their heads; they are the means of the production.”²⁶

Welcome to what Florida calls the “information-and-idea-based economy,” a place where “people have come to accept that they’re on their own—that the traditional sources of security and entitlement no longer exist, or even matter.” Where earlier visionaries prophesied a world in which increased leisure allowed all human beings the well-being and security to freely cultivate their creative instincts, the apostles of the creative class collapse labor into leisure and exploitation into self-expression, and they arrogate creativity to serve corporate ends.

“Capitalism has also expanded its reach to capture the talents of heretofore excluded groups of eccentrics and nonconformists,” Florida writes. “In doing so, it has pulled off yet another astonishing mutation: taking people who would once have been bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe and setting them at the very heart of the process of innovation and economic growth.” According to Florida’s theory, the more creative types colorfully dot an urban landscape, the greater a city’s “Bohemian Index” and the higher the likelihood of the city’s economic success.

It’s all part of what he calls the “Big Morph”—“the resolution of the centuries-old tension between two value systems: the Protestant work ethic and the Bohemian ethic” into a new “creative ethos.” The Protestant ethic treats work as a duty; the Bohemian ethic, he says, is hedonistic. Profit seeking and pleasure seeking have united, the industrialist and the bon vivant have become one. “Highbrow and lowbrow, alternative and mainstream, work and play, CEO and hipster are all morphing together today,” Florida enthuses.²⁷

What kind of labor is it, exactly, that people will perform in this inspired Shangri-la? Florida’s popular essays point the way: he applauds a “teenage sales rep re-conceiving a Vonage display” as a stunning example of creative ingenuity harnessed for economic success; later he announces, anecdotally, that an “overwhelming” number of students would prefer to work “lower-paying temporary jobs in a hair salon” than “good, high-paying jobs in a machine tool factory.” Cosmetology is “more psychologically rewarding, creative work,” he explains.²⁸

It’s tempting to dismiss such a broad definition of creativity as out of touch, but Florida’s declarations illuminate an important trend and one that helped set the terms for the ascension of amateurism. It is not that creative work has suddenly become abundant, as Florida would have us believe; we have not all become Mozarts on the floor of some big-box store, Frida Kahlos at the hair salon. Rather, the point is that the psychology of creativity has become increasingly useful to the economy. The disposition of the artist is ever more in demand. The ethos of the autonomous creator has been repurposed to serve as a seductive facade for a capricious system and adopted as an identity by those who are trying to make their way within it.

Thus the ideal worker matches the traditional profile of the enthusiastic virtuoso: an individual who is versatile and rootless, inventive and adaptable; who self-motivates and works long hours, tapping internal and external resources; who is open to reinvention, emphasizing potential and promise opposed to past achievements; one who loves the work so much, he or she would do it no matter what, and so expects little compensation or commitment in return—amateurs and interns, for example.

The “free” credo promoted by writers such as Chris Anderson and other new-media thinkers has helped lodge a now rung on an ever-lengthening educational and career ladder, the now obligatory internship. Like artists and culture makers of all stripes, interns are said to be “entrepreneurs” and “free agents” investing in their “personal brands.” “The position of interns is not unlike that of many young journalists, musicians, and filmmakers who are now expected to do online work for no pay as a way to boost their portfolios,” writes Ross Perlin, author of the excellent book Intern Nation. “If getting attention and building a reputation online are often seen as more valuable than immediate ‘monetization,’ the same theory is being propounded for internships in the analog world—with exposure, contacts, and references advanced as the prerequisite, or even plausible alternative, to making money.”²⁹

As Perlin documents in vivid detail, capitalizing on desperate résumé-building college students and postgraduates exacerbates inequality. Who can afford to take a job that doesn’t pay but the relatively well off? Those who lack financial means are either shut out of opportunities or forced to support themselves with loans, going into debt for the privilege of working for free.

Creativity is invoked time and again to justify low wages and job insecurity. Across all sectors of the economy, responsibility for socially valuable work, from journalism to teaching and beyond, is being off-loaded onto individuals as institutions retreat from obligations to support efforts that aren’t immediately or immensely profitable. The Chronicle of Higher Education urges graduate students to imagine themselves as artists, to better prepare for the possibility of impoverishment when tenure-track jobs fail to materialize: “We must think of graduate school as more like choosing to go to New York to become a painter or deciding to travel to Hollywood to become an actor. Those arts-based careers have always married hope and desperation into a tense relationship.”³⁰ In a similar vein, NPR reports that the “temp-worker lifestyle” is a kind of “performance art,” a statement that conjures a fearless entertainer mid-tightrope or an acrobat hurling toward the next trapeze without a safety net—a thrilling image, especially to employers who would prefer not to provide benefits.³¹

The romantic stereotype of the struggling artist is familiar to the musician Marc Ribot, a legendary figure on the New York jazz scene who has worked with Marianne Faithfull, Elvis Costello, John Zorn, Tom Waits, Alison Krauss, Robert Plant, and even Elton John. Ribot tells me he had an epiphany watching a “great but lousy” made-for-TV movie about Apple computers. As he tells it, two exhausted employees are complaining about working eighteen-hour days with no weekends when an actor playing Steve Jobs tells them to suck it up—they’re not regular workers at a stodgy company like IBM but artists.

“In other words art was the new model for this form of labor,” Ribot says, explaining his insight. “The model they chose is musicians, like Bruce Springsteen staying up all night to get that perfect track. Their life does not resemble their parents’ life working at IBM from nine to five, and certainly doesn’t resemble their parents’ pay structures—it’s all back end, no front end. All transfer of risk to the worker.” (In 2011 Apple Store workers upset over pay disparities were told, “Money shouldn’t be an issue when you’re employed at Apple. Working at Apple should be viewed as an experience.”)³²

In Ribot’s field this means the more uncertain part of the business—the actual writing, recording, and promoting of music—is increasingly “outsourced” to individuals while big companies dominate arenas that are more likely to be profitable, like concert sales and distribution (Ticketmaster, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play, none of which invests in music but reaps rewards from its release). “That technological change is upon us is undeniable and irreversible,” Ribot wrote about the challenges musicians face as a consequence of digitization. “It will probably not spell the end of music as a commodity, although it may change drastically who is profiting off whose music. Whether these changes will create a positive future for producers or consumers of music depends on whether musicians can organize the legal and collective struggle necessary to ensure that those who profit off music in any form pay the people who make it.”

Ribot quotes John Lennon: “You think you’re so clever and classless and free.” Americans in general like to think of themselves as having transcended economic categories and hierarchies, Ribot says, and artists are no exception. During the Great Depression artists briefly began to think of themselves as workers and to organize as such, amassing social and political power with some success, but today it’s more popular to speak of artists as entrepreneurs or brands, designations that further obscure the issue of labor and exploitation by comparing individual artists to corporate entities or sole proprietors of small businesses.

If artists are fortunate enough to earn money from their art, they tend to receive percentages, fees, or royalties rather than wages; they play “gigs” or do “projects” rather than hold steady jobs, which means they don’t recognize the standard breakdowns of boss and worker. They also spend a lot of time on the road, not rooted in one place; hence they are not able to organize and advocate for their rights.

What’s missing, as Ribot sees it, is a way to understand how the economy has evolved away from the old industrial model and how value is extracted within the new order. “I think that people, not just musicians, need to do an analysis so they stop asking the question, ‘Who is my legal employer?’ and start asking, ‘Who works, who creates things that people need, and who profits from it?’” These questions, Ribot wagers, could be the first step to understanding the model of freelance, flexible labor that has become increasingly dominant across all sectors of the economy, not just in creative fields.

We are told that a war is being waged between the decaying institutions of the off-line world and emerging digital dynamos, between closed industrial systems and open networked ones, between professionals who cling to the past and amateurs who represent the future. The cheerleaders of technological disruption are not alone in their hyperbole. Champions of the old order also talk in terms that reinforce a seemingly unbridgeable divide.

Unpaid amateurs have been likened to monkeys with typewriters, gate-crashing the cultural conversation without having been vetted by an official credentialing authority or given the approval of an established institution. “The professional is being replaced by the amateur, the lexicographer by the layperson, the Harvard professor by the unschooled populace,” according to Andrew Keen, obstinately oblivious to the failings of professionally produced mass culture he defends.

The Internet is decried as a province of know-nothing narcissists motivated by a juvenile desire for fame and fortune, a virtual backwater of vulgarity and phoniness. Jaron Lanier, the technologist turned skeptic, has taken aim at what he calls “digital Maoism” and the ascendance of the “hive mind.” Social media, as Lanier sees it, demean rather than elevate us, emphasizing the machine over the human, the crowd over the individual, the partial over the integral. The problem is not just that Web 2.0 erodes professionalism but, more fundamentally, that it threatens originality and autonomy.

Outrage has taken hold on both sides. But the lines in the sand are not as neatly drawn as the two camps maintain. Wikipedia, considered the ultimate example of amateur triumph as well as the cause of endless hand-wringing, hardly hails the “death of the expert” (the common claim by both those who love the site and those who despise it). While it is true that anyone can contribute to the encyclopedia, their entries must have references, and many of the sources referenced qualify as professional. Most entries boast citations of academic articles, traditional books, and news stories. Similarly, social production does not exist quite outside the mainstream. Up to 85 percent of the open source Linux developers said to be paradigmatic of this new age of volunteerism are, in fact, employees of large corporations that depend on nonproprietary software.³³

More generally, there is little evidence that the Internet has precipitated a mass rejection of more traditionally produced fare. What we are witnessing is a convergence, not a coup. Peer-to-peer sites—estimated to take up half the Internet’s bandwidth—are overwhelmingly used to distribute traditional commercial content, namely mainstream movies and music. People gather on message boards to comment on their favorite television shows, which they download or stream online. The most popular videos on YouTube, year after year, are the product of conglomerate record labels, not bedroom inventions. Some of the most visited sites are corporate productions like CNN. Most links circulated on social media are professionally produced. The challenge is to understand how power and influence are distributed within this mongrel space where professional and amateur combine.

Consider, for a moment, Clay Shirky, whose back-flap biography boasts corporate consulting gigs with Nokia, News Corp, BP, the U.S. Navy, Lego, and others. Shirky embodies the strange mix of technological utopianism and business opportunism common to many Internet entrepreneurs and commentators, a combination of populist rhetoric and unrepentant commercialism. Many of amateurism’s loudest advocates are also business apologists, claiming to promote cultural democracy while actually advising corporations on how to seize “collaboration and self-organization as powerful new levers to cut costs” in order to “discover the true dividends of collective capability and genius” and “usher their organizations into the twenty-first century.”³⁴

The grassroots rhetoric of networked amateurism has been harnessed to corporate strategy, continuing a nefarious tradition. Since the 1970s populist outrage has been yoked to free-market ideology by those who exploit cultural grievances to shore up their power and influence, directing public animus away from economic elites and toward cultural ones, away from plutocrats and toward professionals. But it doesn’t follow that criticizing “professionals” or “experts” or “cultural elites” means that we are striking a blow against the real powers; and when we uphold amateur creativity, we are not necessarily resolving the deeper problems of entrenched privilege or the irresistible imperative of profit. Where online platforms are concerned, our digital pastimes can sometimes promote positive social change and sometimes hasten the transfer of wealth to Silicon Valley billionaires.

Even well-intentioned celebration of networked amateurism has the potential to obscure the way money still circulates. That’s the problem with PressPausePlay, a slick documentary about the digital revolution that premiered at a leading American film festival. The directors examine the ways new tools have sparked a creative overhaul by allowing everyone to participate—or at least everyone who owns the latest Apple products. That many of the liberated media makers featured in the movie turn out to work in advertising and promotion, like celebrity business writer Seth Godin, who boasts of his ability to turn his books into bestsellers by harnessing the power of the Web, underscores how the hype around the cultural upheaval sparked by connective technologies easily slides from making to marketing. While the filmmakers pay tribute to DIY principles and praise the empowering potential of digital tools unavailable a decade ago, they make little mention of the fact that the telecommunications giant Ericsson provided half of the movie’s seven-hundred-thousand-dollar budget and promotional support.³⁵

We should be skeptical of the narrative of democratization by technology alone. The promotion of Internet-enabled amateurism is a lazy substitute for real equality of opportunity. More deeply, it’s a symptom of the retreat over the past half century from the ideals of meaningful work, free time, and shared prosperity—an agenda that entailed enlisting technological innovation for the welfare of each person, not just the enrichment of the few.

Instead of devising truly liberating ways to harness machines to remake the economy, whether by designing satisfying jobs or through the social provision of a basic income to everyone regardless of work status, we have Amazon employees toiling on the warehouse floor for eleven dollars an hour and Google contract workers who get fired after a year so they don’t have to be brought on full-time. Cutting-edge new-media companies valued in the tens of billions retain employees numbering in the lowly thousands, and everyone else is out of luck. At the same time, they hoard their record-setting profits, sitting on mountains of cash instead of investing it in ways that would benefit us all.

The zeal for amateurism looks less emancipatory—as much necessity as choice—when you consider the crisis of rising educational costs, indebtedness, and high unemployment, all while the top 1 percent captures an ever-growing portion of the surplus generated by increased productivity. (Though productivity has risen 23 percent since 2000, real hourly pay has effectively stagnated.)³⁶ The consequences are particularly stark for young people: between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth for householders under thirty-five was down 68 percent while rising 42 percent for those over sixty-five.³⁷ Many are delaying starting families of their own and moving back in with Mom and Dad.

Our society’s increasing dependence on free labor—online and off—is immoral in this light. The celebration of networked amateurism—and of social production and the cognitive surplus—glosses over the question of who benefits from our uncompensated participation online. Though some internships are enjoyable and useful, the real beneficiary of this arrangement is corporate America, which reaps the equivalent of a two-billion-dollar annual subsidy.³⁸ And many of the digital platforms to which we contribute are highly profitable entities, run not for love but for money.

Creative people have historically been encouraged to ignore economic issues and maintain indifference to matters like money and salaries. Many of us believe that art and culture should not succumb to the dictates of the market, and one way to do this is to act as though the market doesn’t exist, to devise a shield to deflect its distorting influence, and uphold the lack of compensation as virtuous. This stance can provide vital breathing room, but it can also perpetuate inequality. “I consistently come across people valiantly trying to defy an economic class into which they were born,” Richard Florida writes. “This is particularly true of the young descendants of the truly wealthy—the capitalist class—who frequently describe themselves as just ‘ordinary’ creative people working on music, film or intellectual endeavors of one sort or another.”

How valiant to deny the importance of money when it is had in abundance. “Economic power is first and foremost a power to keep necessity at arm’s length,” the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu observed. Especially, it seems, the necessity of talking honestly about economics.

Those who applaud social production and networked amateurism, the colorful cacophony that is the Internet, and the creative capacities of everyday people to produce entertaining and enlightening things online, are right to marvel. There is amazing inventiveness, boundless talent and ability, and overwhelming generosity on display. Where they go wrong is in thinking that the Internet is an egalitarian, let alone revolutionary, platform for our self-expression and development, that being able to shout into the digital torrent is adequate for democracy.

The struggle between amateurs and professionals is, fundamentally, a distraction. The tragedy for all of us is that we find ourselves in a world where the qualities that define professional work—stability, social purpose, autonomy, and intrinsic and extrinsic rewards—are scarce. “In part, the blame falls on the corporate elite,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote back in 1989, “which demands ever more bankers and lawyers, on the one hand, and low-paid helots on the other.” These low-paid helots are now unpaid interns and networked amateurs. The rub is that over the intervening years we have somehow deceived ourselves into believing that this state of insecurity and inequity is a form of liberation.