Tran|Script

I’ve been meaning to write about Flattr, and blogging, and OER and why it is potentially such an important development. I’ve stopped each time I’ve gone to post, because I have far too much to say about it. I’ll get to it later, I’ve thought.

Then today, a good friend of mine whose internet work is responsible for more positive social change than you can imagine told me they were going to have to close up shop. They have a job, a family, friends — and they need to get back to them.

There’s plenty of money, mind you, that will continue to advance the interests of BP, Halliburton, Mastercard, and Pfizer. And a ton of money that will continue to make sure Pearson Education gets what they want, and that the future of education looks roughly like Bill Gates wants it to. Time Warner and Apple and Wal-mart will also be just fine. Disney will be able to continue to populate my radio with crappy 14 year old singers destroying 80s tunes, while ensuring through legislation that same 80s tunes stay corporate property, and never become our common heritage. The influence of those funds, in the wake of the Citizens United decision will only increase in impact.

So while it seems really uncouth to talk about money, it’s irresponsible not to.

That’s where Flattr, the brainchild of Pirate Bay pioneer Peter Sunde, comes into play. I’ll let the founders explain it here:

Here’s what’s so exciting about this. Long before the web was run off of the profits of Google AdWords, the belief was that people working on the web could be rewarded for their work incrementally through micropayments, which Cory Doctorow has accurately described as

…a hoary science-fictional notion that captured the imaginations of dotcom marketers in the 1990s: the idea is that one can sell goods to even the flintiest of customers just by dropping the cost low enough — charging a tenth of a cent to read a single blog-post or to look at three photos. In micros’ heyday, the theory was that once new computer-driven efficiency made credit-card processing cheap enough, it would be possible to pull this off, either by aggregating the charges before processing them or by inventing new payment-processing systems that could efficiently run tiny charges in realtime without keeling over under the weight of the transaction charges.

While the transaction cost thing can be solved by aggregating transactions, the other bigger problems of micropayment were never addressed. Again, I defer to Doctorow’s excellent explanation:

In general, the cost of figuring out whether you want to pay a sum (what Clay Shirky calls the “mental transaction cost”) remains high, no matter how small the monetary cost and no matter how efficient the system is. The web’s strength is in how adventurous it encourages us to be in what we click on — that’s how we get exposed to such a breadth of material online. Adding even a tiny cost to a link brings the cost of being adventurous from zero to non-zero, a step-change that requires enough thought that the overwhelming majority shrug and find a cheaper link to follow. The web isn’t short of links.

So micropayments went bust, and what we got instead was the ad-fueled world we see today. It’s worth asking what sort of incentives ad revenue sets up. In a ad-fueled world, you want the most views, in probably a relatively narrow field (but profit-related) to get the greatest amount of click-throughs. Beyond that, I always feel that there is something a bit icky about ads — I’ve run them on some sites to cover costs, but I can never shake the feeling that the bargain I’m striking is “I’ll do something for you (let you see this article) if you let me do something TO you (make you see this ad that the majority of you will find just noise). It pays for the server and the domain name, but at the expense of cheapening your relationship with your audience.

So this is where Flattr is brilliant. People have said Flattr is essentially the Facebook “like” button with a small amount of money attached. But I think when you drill down it is deeper than that.

Outside of the brilliance of avoiding the “transaction mental cost” through a flat rate system, the most brilliant thing is everyone is a producer and a consumer.

Let’s break apart what that means.

I’m listening to music right now, and writing a blog entry about, well, supposedly edtech. I am listening through Pandora, which pops in some ads and pays the writer of the song a fraction of a cent for playing it to me.

What if we got rid of the middleman? What if I went and downloaded this whole album free, and then I flattrd the songs I like while I listened to it and wrote this post? And then what if the people that read this who liked it flattrd it?

Do you start to see what would happen? At the bottom would be people that don’t produce anything flattr-able, who pay a flat rate of their choosing to make them feel OK about the music they download, and make sure the bands they like can continue to put out music.

Here’s the neat part though — hopefully the vast middle is a bunch of people that are both consumers and producers, and those that write smaller blogs use their Flattr to support those that write the bigger blogs, or those that write the music they listen to while writing their blogs, or those making OER, etc., etc. At the top are those whose impact is large enough that they can afford to reduce their day-time work hours to accommodate what it is they do — music, OER, art, political analysis, citizen reporting. Or YouTube videos of cats dancing (it’s not all techno-utopia).

In other words, this middle bunch, which can’t make enough to support themselves, or even enough to buy daily coffee, can make enough to make sure the essential sites are well supported through their redistribution of that. It begins to look less like Pay Pal, and more like an intermediate state between money and Whuffie.

I want to talk more over the next week or so about Flattr and gift based economies on the web, and I will. But I wanted to get the ball rolling now. If you blog, write music, or do anything, really, consider checking Flattr out.

More on Flattr and OER later.