“ What [Wired editor Chris Anderson] is proposing is down somewhere, on the scale of ethics, well beneath Wal-Mart’s policies of no longer hiring any full-time workers so as to avoid health and unemployment insurance. It is in fact some weird sort of neo-feudal, post-contract-worker society, in which he will create a dystopian and eager volunteer-slave system of “attention-paid” enthusiasts (which is to say, people with no other options, and no capital of their own) to create products from which rich people can get richer.
”
— Choire Sicha on Chris Anderson’s response to Gladwell’s New Yorker takedown of his new book.
From either a policy or an aesthetic perspective, this is indeed a terrifying scenario, and it’s one that, as Sicha points out, already runs rampant thoughout the inter-spheres. I won’t pretend I have the solution to the economics of zero-scarcity, but I shudder to think a version of creative wage-slavery Ayn Rand would be proud of is it.
From either a policy or an aesthetic perspective, this is indeed a terrifying scenario, and it’s one that, as Sicha points out, already runs rampant thoughout the inter-spheres. I won’t pretend I have the solution to the economics of zero-scarcity, but I shudder to think a version of creative wage-slavery Ayn Rand would be proud of is it.
