Fat Cats and Very Skinny, Very Hungry Mice

Economic disruption is nothing new, as anyone who thinks about it for two minutes must realize, but how far back in history would you look for the first displacement of workers? Douglas Rushkoff, in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, sees the beginning of the corporate model, still dominant today’s digital economy, occurring in the late Middle Ages -- not long after a few clever peasants (mice, in my scenario) had managed to escape the thumb of the aristocrats.

Prior to the rise of trade guilds, the aristocracy held all the cards. With the guilds, a previously nonexistent merchant class began to emerge. Europeans returning from the Crusades brought back the notion of the bazaar, and European economic expansion took off.

“The problem,” Rushkoff writes, “was that while the merchant class was gaining wealth, the aristocracy was losing it.” Naturally, the aristocracy was not thrilled with this turn of events, and since they were still the ones making laws, they had the power to reconfigure the emergent economy. Demanding taxes and official charters, breaking up guilds (think “unions” today), and outlawing of local currencies by mandating that only the “coin of the realm,” issued by the king, was legitimate, the aristocracy soon had craftsmen selling their labor rather than their products.

What we now call industrialization was actually an extension of the aristocracy’s effort to usurp the growth it witnessed in the peasants’ marketplace and to imitate it by other means.

With mass production came cheap goods – nominally “cheap,” anyway, because many costs, then as now, were hidden or externalized. “Prices may be low, but the costs are high,” Rushkoff writes. Then, for some reason obscure to me, he puts the following key sentence in parentheses:

(The government pays for wars to procure cheap oil and roads to convey mass-produced products, while we all pay for the environmental stresses caused by corporate agriculture, and so on.)

His primary historical thesis is that the digital revolution has only speeded up a sequence of events repeated many times throughout the course of history: independent artists, artisans, and entrepreneurs find ingenious ways to escape what we in the Sixties called “the System,” only to have the System evolve new ways to ensnare labor or eliminate the need for workers altogether so fat cats can take the lion’s share of profits. Industrial robotics? Just the latest wave.

Responsibility of corporate CEOs is only to shareholders, not to you, the employee, or you, the member of a community. Not only industry but even education has been transformed by burden-shifting. And as for the immigration “problem,” it isn’t so much families illegally entering the U.S. from Mexico but business gaming of guestworker regulations that should be worrying Americans. Read about that, if you please.

These days musicians and writers are expected to give their work away 24/7 for the “exposure,” Uber drivers (many of them unemployed workers driving fulltime) find themselves making less than minimum wage after expenses, and at-home keyboard pokers for the online behemoth earn less than two dollars an hour.

...When Arianna Huffington went on to sell [her] entire enterprise to AOL for $315 million, she did not cut her nine thousand unpaid writers in on the winnings. It was as if receiving exposure on the Web site’s pages, we were already the beneficiaries of Arianna’s largesse.

“Re-invent yourself! Brand yourself!” the laid-off worker is told in hearty, encouraging tones by life coaches paid to promote positive thinking. Meanwhile, firms that manage retirement funds take bites out of the savings of others at every turn, that savings often shrinking rather than growing, while 70% of the savers don’t even know they are being charged fees.

So it’s an old story, repeated down through the ages -- but now that there are no new continents left to exploit, according to Rushkoff, the system has begun to cannibalize itself, and that’s why in the digital/investment world the best way to make a killing is not to make anything. The dream now is to have an idea, attract investors, and then turn around and sell for a fortune. Those of us who still work for a living and believe in the value of work are the chumps, as in “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

Could the world be different? Amazingly, the author believes the answer is yes. Money, he points out, is a system created by human beings, so there’s no reason they can’t modify the system or create substitutes. He gives detailed examples, but I’m not getting into that. I’ve tried to distill only enough of the story to convince you that this book is worth reading.

What do you think?

*  *  *

Oddly, perhaps, I feel less alone seeing my life and those of my cohort in historical perspective, and I feel proud of those of us who do an honest day's work. Am I crazy? We’re not raking in the dough, maybe barely hanging on, but we’re keeping the faith, and I would be ashamed to acquire wealth, as my artist husband puts it, by “kneeling on the backs of the oppressed.” 

A few years ago I was approached by a financial scam artist who opened his spiel by saying that perhaps I’d noticed he wasn’t working any more – and that was because, he boasted, he longer had to work. He’d gotten in on this terrific Ponzi scheme – oops! He didn’t call it that, of course. “Financial opportunity,” I believe, was the phrase he used. Still, he was not a very smooth operator, in general, putting his foot fully into his mouth to assure me that he didn’t expect me to have money for the scheme (true, but gratuitously insulting). He just thought I could give him the names and telephone numbers of some of my “rich friends.”

What kind of friend did he take me for? Drive my friends like lambs to the slaughter? I hope it goes without saying that I declined to be involved in any way, shape or form.

Only later, à l’escalier, as it were, did it occur to me what I should have said when he told me he was no longer working because he “didn’t have to.” This is it:

I’m still working. I feel I have something to contribute to society.

Anyway, read the book. No kidding, it’s a page-turner. I’d love to see the National Writers Series bring Rushkoff to Traverse City. Anyone else feel the same way?

The Apples Have Always Been Rolling

Someone dropped off bales of hay for the deer

I am being led to a conclusion can only be provisional at this stage, but what I’m thinking is that the world of publishing and bookselling, at least as far as the English language is concerned, has always been in a state of upheaval. One historian wrote the following in 1889, reflecting on the English book world of the 1500s:

In prosecuting an inquiry into the general state of bookselling just three hundred years ago, a frequent and not altogether explicable circumstance is that in relation to the different imprints which appear in some cases in the same year on one work. There was practically no such thing as copyright; and the moment a manuscript left the author's hand, and found its way into the printing-office, all claim on the part of the author ceased. If one bookseller had sufficient confidence to publish a poem or a play, and it proved successful, the chances were a thousand to one that rival tradesmen would offer rival copies. – William Roberts, The Earlier History of English Bookselling, 1889

Now, you know those warnings on DVD movies about piracy not being a victimless crime? It isn’t a new crime, either. Nor was it the only concern in the book world of the sixteenth century. As might readily be imagined – and, in fact, as we all learned in our history lessons back in high school – the introduction of the printing press brought challenges to political and religious authority. If ordinary people became literate and could read the Bible for themselves, what was to stop them from interpreting it for themselves? From thinking for themselves on all matter of questions?

For example, parallel to revolutions in politics and theology came a revolution in medicine, the idea that every literate Englishman might be “his own doctor.”

Just as the publication of the Bible in the vernacular eventually made ministers redundant, by selling printed matter that enabled every man to become his own doctor, which the title of one publication proposed, London bookmen undermined the legal monopoly of the traditional medical establishment and assured the success of its challengers. – Elizabeth Lane Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (University of Rochester Press, 2002)

The bare notion of medical books being published in English rather than Latin was deemed dangerous by many in the Royal College of Physicians of London, those Furdell refers to as the “philosopher-kings of medicine” of the time, although Sir Thomas Elyot, author of Castle of Helth [sic], published in 1543, defended the practice by bidding his critics

“...remember that the Greeks wrote in Greeke, that Romaines in Latin, Avicinna and the other in Arabick, which were their owne proper and maternall tongues.” – quoted in Furnall, ibid.

Sixteenth-century medical books for the general public included botanicals, herbals, astrological treatises, recipe books “with lists of ingredients and directions for usage,” the line between cooking and preparation of remedies blurred in literature as well as in practice.

In early modern England, the “author” of a book (especially a foreign author whose work might be translated and published without his permission, let alone any remuneration) had little standing unless he were also a printer, and a printer might begin in a small way and work up to maintaining his own bookshop -- vertical integration at the very birth of the business of publishing and bookselling! Publishers of medical books often sold the remedies, also, in their combination bookshop/drugstores. Self-publishing and one-stop shopping!

Rivalry among printer/publisher/booksellers was fierce, too. Any “stationer” could record the name of a work (this had to be done in person) in the books kept at the Company Hall of the London Company of Stationers (“a union of printers, booksellers, bookbinders, and a few paper merchants”), which was chartered in 1557 to self-police the book trade. Along with recording the work, the union “stationer” paid a fee to register it, thus effectively blocking anyone else from publishing it, and not surprisingly cutthroat practices developed, such that “an ambitious printer ... registering a sweeping series title for anticipated books” could block rivals out of an entire topic or category.

Who owns a name? Today’s copyright and patent wars are nothing new; they have roots at least as far back as the sixteenth century.

Picture a struggling bookseller of the 1500s -- burdened with a large capital investment in printing presses, threatened by jealous physicians and clerics, harassed by government censors, set about by unscrupulous rivals – did he manage to get any sleep at all? Or did she, in those cases (and there were several) where a wife inherited her husband’s printing business and continued it herself, sometimes marrying a young apprentice printer to share the work?

The Charles Dickens biography I read recently shed a little light on nineteenth century practices, both in England and in America. Dickens had his first success, Pickwick Papers, with the publishers Chapman and Hall in London. Robert Seymour, a caricature artist, had suggested a series of sporting plates to Mr. Chapman, and Mr. Hall invited Dickens to contribute “letter-press,” or text to accompany the illustrations. The serial publication of the work was a flop (the publishers nearly abandoned it after a few numbers), but Dickens had a huge success from the subsequent book. Dickens received £2,500 and a share in the copyright, while the publishers’ profits were over £20,000. Thirty-two manuscript pages of Pickwick sold for $775 in 1895, according to Leacock, and for $35,000 in 1928. What would those pages bring today? Of course, Dickens did not see these later amounts, but he was even in his day a rich man, made rich by his writing, though others did the printing, publishing, and selling of his work.

To return to the knotty business of piracy-- the United States in the nineteenth century, at that time a young country, had no respect whatsoever for copyrights issued overseas, and Charles Dickens was terribly affronted by the publication of his works in America, earning him no royalties. In fact, while his first American tour began with loud, effusive mutual admiration and gratitude, Dickens and the Americans seeming completely in love with one another, the longer the tour went on, the more Dickens found the issue of nonpayment of royalties rankled. According to Leacock, along with slavery and tobacco-spitting it formed a triumvirate of offenses committed by the former colony.

(When did American publishers first begin paying royalties to foreign authors? The first step in that direction was the Copyright Act of 1891, but I seem to remember, vaguely, that one prestigious American publishing house was ahead of the curve, making a corporate decision to do the right thing before they were forced to it. The question is, which publisher was it? I don’t recall and am too impatient to keep searching for the answer this morning.)

Sometimes in my random reading, an unintended theme emerges, and so it has been this March. Discovering the English travel writer Norman Lewis (I have yet to read any of his novels), I find myself following a minor thread in his book The World, The World, namely, his relationship, and those of a few others, with his publisher Jonathan Cape. In 1948 Lewis took a novel to Routledge, where a friend of his regretfully told him it was “publishable ... but perhaps not for us.” It was suggested that he try Jonathan Cape, then the top of the English publishing world.

Here is one bit I liked: One man’s way of sorting through manuscripts was to read a few pages and then, if those pages passed muster, to set the manuscript aside to take home. This man read about ten manuscripts a week. The method of the second man was to read the first page of the manuscript, two or three at random from the middle, then the end, taking only about fifteen minutes at the task. Lewis remarks that he was fortunate in the pages Daniel George read from the middle of his own work. He was also fortunate in his contract with the publisher, apparently. Not so fortunate had been Mary Webb, as Lewis relates.

The publicity campaign for Webb’s Precious Bane is a story in itself (did Jonathan Cape invent hype in the 1950s?), but her treatment at the hands of her publisher were of a very different order. Sensing a bestseller, Cape bought up copyrights for Webb’s previous “near-flops,” which in the wake of Precious Bane “shared enough of the limelight to become commercially viable,” but then refused to pay “anticipatory release” of royalties.

She remained short of cash and her appeals for loans were turned down. Jonathan refused to see her and his deputy Wren Howard put her off and got his face smacked. By this time her health was failing. She was reduced to keeping a flower stall on Shrewsbury market, and with her books selling by the thousands – as they continued to do for many years – she died in near poverty. – Norman Lewis, The World, The World  (NY: Henry Holt, 1997)

Scraping along as a flower-seller until her death in “near poverty” while her books were selling “by the thousands”! There is a story! The prize studs in Jonathan Cape’s stables were T. E. Lawrence and Ian Fleming, and it was through Fleming that Lewis came to meet Ernest Hemingway, whose first book Cape had published. Mary Webb, it seems, was only the goose roasted for the others’ Christmas dinner.

A blink in time's eye

My point in all of this is simply that there probably has never been, since the beginning of books printed, published, and sold in the English language, any time when the book trade was settled and secure. Self-publishing is not new; vertical integration is not new; public desire for direct access to medical information is not new; piracy is not new. 

We tend to think of the constant change and reshuffling of our own time as the upsetting of a long-stable apple cart, but the truth seems more like a continual upsetting over the course of more than five hundred years. 

All God's creatures scrabbling to make a living --