{"id":325,"date":"2006-04-06T11:35:37","date_gmt":"2006-04-06T17:35:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=325"},"modified":"2006-04-06T11:35:37","modified_gmt":"2006-04-06T17:35:37","slug":"grace_notes_and","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=325","title":{"rendered":"Grace notes and bank notes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Web 2.0 Rorschach test continues. Doc Searls, having seen<\/a> in the sharing of data and software among commercial web sites signs of the emergence of a higher morality in economics, founded on generosity rather than self-interest, now climbs another rung up his stairway to heaven. He discerns<\/a> at work on the web the invisible hand not of Adam Smith but of God: “Whether or not the dismal science can brook the concept (and we’re a long way from finding out), I do think grace is a big aspect of What’s Going On. (A positive way we all get to play God, you might say.)”<\/p>\n

Searls is inspired by a post<\/a> from the blog of A.K.M. Adam, an Episcopalian priest: “I believe in the kind of interactions that Doc describes as a ‘morality of generosity’ … As a theologian, I affirm the priority of grace (generosity, gratuity, giving) over other modes of interaction.” It’s “the response that blows my mind most at the moment,” writes Searls.<\/p>\n

Since Searls’s touchstone for the new economics of grace is Flickr, maybe we should pause a moment and listen to what Flickr’s owner, Yahoo, has to say about all this goodness. Seth Finkelstein, in a comment on my earlier post<\/a> on this matter, points to a revealing passage in the recent Newsweek cover story<\/a> on “the Living Web”:<\/p>\n

\n

Flickr was a good business, too, as many users chose to pay the $25-a-year fee for unlimited photo storage and relief from advertising on the site. But that’s not why Yahoo bought it for an estimated $35 million. “With less than 10 people on the payroll, they had millions of users generating content, millions of users organizing that content for them, tens of thousands of users distributing that across the Internet, and thousands of people not on the payroll actually building the thing,” says Yahoo exec Bradley Horowitz. “That’s a neat trick. If we could do that same thing with Yahoo, and take our half-billion user base and achieve the same kind of effect, we knew we were on to something.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t smell a lot of grace going on there. What I smell is good old-fashioned self-interest, maybe even an insidious, if fairly gentle, new form of commercial exploitation. Boris Anthony, in a fascinating post<\/a> about the Newsweek piece, peeled the grace off the Web 2.0 phenomenon and looked at what lies underneath:<\/p>\n

\n

It’s not about you, it’s about your data – or “bits of your life digitized and uploaded” – and the way you structure it and contextualize it and share it. That’s what the big money hubbub is about …<\/p>\n

I use Flickr every day – more like 300 times a day; it’s my #1 destination, almost as often as my email inbox – and I manage weblogs that sport Google Ads and Technorati tags and del.ico.us links and all that stuff. I just want to try to make sure people actually realize what is going on.<\/p>\n

We are all working for them. For free. That’s how it’s “about we”. It’s not a “media revolution”, it’s a reversion to feudal medievalism. “Voluntary servitude” it’s been called (back in 1548!)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe Searls’s “grace” is just the opiate of the web masses. It wouldn’t be the first time.<\/p>\n

At the end of his post, A.K.M. Adam backs away from Searls’s proposal of a higher business morality. He admits that he has “little worth saying” about whether “Web 2.0 makes altruism central to business success”:<\/p>\n

\n

Sure, I root for companies to demonstrate the generosity that Doc commends, but I know less than zero about the balance sheets behind the people I know in The Industry. Maybe … altruism (which is not just the same as \u201cgrace\u201d) bears no reliable connection to success in the Web 2.0 market … Doc invokes the theology of grace to encourage business operators to show the same generosity that Flickr (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo) does \u2014 but I invoke the theology of grace because it\u2019s the right thing. Do it, eh?<\/p>\n

After all, what does it profit someone to rake up a windfall on Web 2.0 and lose their soul?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words: Don’t worship false gods.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Web 2.0 Rorschach test continues. Doc Searls, having seen in the sharing of data and software among commercial web sites signs of the emergence of a higher morality in economics, founded on generosity rather than self-interest, now climbs another rung up his stairway to heaven. He discerns at work on the web the invisible […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}