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Wednesday, July 10, 2002 |
"I'm mad as hell, and I'm just going to put up with it..."
There's a lot of them. Weblogs posted from DilbertLand. Entry after entry like this:My job sucks. I work with wienies and idiots. My boss plots behind my back. The company makes junk. I can't wait to get off work and get blitzed.
If you are hate your job, why don't you quit?
People who work at jobs they hate, even though they have a choice not to, are perpetuating the existence of the Sucky Job. They are teaching the sucky boss that it's okay to abuse the employees. They are teaching the sucky company that it's okay to Not Care. And they are teaching the people around them that they are powerless, that you can't change the system.
I can understand how someone working a minimum wage job, with debts to pay off, may not feel able to quit, and I won't argue with that person. But the Dilbertland bloggers aren't in minimum wage jobs; they're working at tech jobs that pay a decent salary. They don't have family ties because they're single and they usually claim to hate their family; they moved to LA or San Francisco or New York to get away from them. Do they think that, later on, they'll have paid off those student loans, bought the new car, whatever, and be ready for the change? People never run out of reasons why it's risky to quit the job they hate. The people I know who've tried this have mostly ended up laid off and job-hunting from a position of weakness, when they could have planned their job hunt and done it while still employed.
For an example of someone who I think did the right thing, check out Dorothea Salo's weblog, Caveat Lector. I don't know Dorothea, though she works here at UW, but I admire her choices and the values they express. Most of what I'm thinking of is archived in her work archive
Janis Ian on Intellectual Property and the Recording Industry
Janis Ian is probably most famous to my generation for "At Seventeen", a lovely, sad song about the realities of adolescence. A decade before that, she was famous for "Society's Child", a controversial song about inter-racial love. With luck, she may become famous to the post-Napster generation for her article on intellectual property and the recording industry.Putting MP3s on her website for free downloads results in sales of her CDs. In a story I hadn't seen before, she also mentions fantasy author Mercedes Lackey, who made an out of print book available for download, and saw an across-the-board boost in her sales in bookstores.
It's easy enough to see why the big four of the recording industry don't care about this: their business model is built on keeping artists in thrall to "the starmaker machinery behind the popular song", being able to make the next Britney or Backstreet Boys by fiat. It's a system that doesn't offer choice to the consumer and leaves the artists with no power over their own career. It's hard to see why we listen to the industry: they're the ones who have been ripping artists off for decades, who raised the prices when CDs came out, even though CDs are cheaper to make than LPs; who have always left the risks to developing new sounds like reggae, rap, grunge rock, house music, etc. to tiny independent labels.
One other major point: in the hysteria of the moment, everyone is forgetting the main way an artist becomes successful - exposure. Without exposure, no one comes to shows, no one buys CDs, no one enables you to earn a living doing what you love. Again, from personal experience: in 37 years as a recording artist, I've created 25+ albums for major labels, and I've never once received a royalty check that didn't show I owed them money.
