Following a lead from Andrew Sullivan, I find myself at this article on a website called "Internet Evolution". In it, author Andrew Keen speculates that the coming recession could spell an end to free content on the Internet.

I know nothing of Keen, this website, or the culture of Silicon Valley geeks in general, but I sense some back story here. It's pretty clear that he has a bug up his butt about some technogeek subculture that I can't quite identify — something broad enough to encompass everything from open-source software to amateurs putting up home movies on YouTube, all of which Keen lumps together and disdains as if decrying the delusion of a bunch of idealistic hippies.

After a short rant, he concludes:

I don't know about open-source, which I tend to see as primarily a deliberate corporate strategy, but with regard to all-volunteer projects like Wikipedia (and presumably YouTube, MySpace, and the others) he fails completely to understand what motivates people.

Yet another Andrew, Benzene's blog-brother Andrew Gelman (whom I've known since ages ago when he and my sister were both in grad school at Berkeley), writes a lot about the economics of voting. One of the better-known papers he co-authored makes the case, repeated in some articles during the recent election season, that voting really is rational.

That this would even be an argument makes sense only if you understand that for many years the conventional wisdom among economists has been that voting is not rational. This has escaped the notice of most ordinary people, who happily go out and vote, or at least think that they ought to. The economists look at it more critically. They do a cost-benefit analysis for you, supported with lots of numbers and math. They figure how much effort it costs you to take the trouble to vote and how much reward you expect to enjoy if your candidate wins as a result. They also figure that the chance of your vote actually making the difference is something like one in a zillion. Even if the inconvenience of voting is small and the benefit from your side winning is large, there's no way it is a zillion times larger. Therefore, the cost-benefit analysis says the rational thing is to not waste your time and effort on voting.

The counter-argument by Gelman et al, also supported with lots of numbers and math, is that the benefit you derive from your candidate winning accrues not just to yourself but (in your opinion) to everyone else in the country as well. Therefore, even if your perceived benefit of the right person winning the presidency is only, say, 100 times the effort it costs you to vote for him, that 100 times is multiplied by the 300 million citizens of the United States, at which point, depending on what state you live in, even one zillionth of that is still enough to justify the effort of voting. Hence, voting is rational after all.

When Keen argues that it is irrational to give away free content on the Internet, he's making the same error as the economists. People don't do it for their own gain; they do it because they believe it will benefit others. It may well be that the writers at Huffington Post are hoping to build up the experience and reputation that could land them an Andrew-Sullivan type sinecure somewhere, but that certainly isn't the case for the other 99% of bloggers toiling away on their tiny little blogs. I don't contribute to MySpace or YouTube, but I've spent some hours working on Wikipedia. The idea that any Wikipedians are motivated by "the speculative hope that they might get some 'back end' revenue" is completely laughable. By what fanciful path could anyone ever imagine that happening?

My Wikipedia contributions have been minor, but when the Internet was young (and I was unemployed), I did some fairly substantial research that was "published" on the Usenet. I even have an Internet "business" that does gain me a small amount of money, a small collection of sheet music and librettos which I've offered up as "shareware", which is to say anyone who prints and uses them is supposed to send me a few dollars in the mail. I collect an average of 10 to 15 dollars a month on these, which means at the end of the year my earnings have approximately equaled my pay for one day at my regular job. When I find in my mailbox an envelope with two dollars and a note, it does give me a little fillip of joy. The joy comes not from the two dollars, but from the note saying, "I found your song on the Internet and it was just what I was looking for. Thank you."

Keen is focused on money. That's not wrong. I'm certainly no anti-rationalist who decries pursuit of wealth. But money is simply the currency we use for getting the things that are our real goals. The real question is why do we want money. Yes, we have material needs, and material desires as well. We spend our money on these things. We also sometimes spend our money helping others, and we do this because that too is a basic human need. No doubt there are some individuals, possibly including Andrew Keen, who feel no desire to give to others, just as there are some individuals who don't wish to procreate, don't need human companionship, or don't crave the esteem of others. But the lack of complete universality doesn't mean it's not a fundamental human urge. It is.

Human beings want to help others. We want to make the world a better place for others. Just as the Internet has created a new means for commerce, education and communication, it has also created a new means to people to make their contribution, large or small, to the betterment of the world. That's why YouTube and Wikipedia will persist, recession or no.

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