I'm envisioning a new economic system based on the idea that people should pay for content instead of for "packaging," and based on the idea that people should be able to make their living by contributing to their society instead of by voluntarily enslaving themselves to a corporation.
I'm very interested in your comments and ideas! Poll below.
Let me start with an application. Imagine if, instead of simply uploading a video to YouTube, Jane decides on a price for her video 2-minute long video. Perhaps she decides on a price of 12 cents to view her video. Suppose that every YouTube viewer has a PayPal-type account with YouTube. When a person decides to view the video, 12 cents is deducted from his account and put in Jane's account. Perhaps Google takes a 1% commission for providing the service.
Suppose that Jim emails you and tells you that there is a really awesome video that you need to watch. He says "This girl is an amazing breakdancer! I'm telling you, this YouTube video is totally worth the 12 cents!" But you just spent $1.95 on an advertisement-free episode of The Sopranos and you just spent two hours watching the (free) democratic debates, and you're just not that interested in seeing the breakdancer right now. Plus you just got a really interesting idea of your own that you think people would like to hear about.
So instead of watching the breakdancing video, you spend your next few hours putting together a presentation which you upload to YouTube later that day. Before you do, you decide how much you're going to charge for it. Are you going to make it free? Or do you want a little compensation for your idea. Remember, if you charge just $.01 and get 4,000 hits (which is certainly not unusual for YouTube), you've made $40. Not only that, but 4,000 people will have seen your idea. (And, by the way, Google will have made $.40 on the transaction.)
Regardless of what your video is about, submitting it to YouTube is in fact a contribution to society, and you will be compensated for it in accordance with the price you decide on and the number of people who believe that your contribution is worth that price. Luckily, you have submitted videos to YouTube before and people know that your stuff is often good, so they are likely to agree to pay the penny to see your latest contribution.
I'm calling the idea, of which the above scenario is an application, "Contributism." It is similar to capitalism in that it involves a "free market." But I submit that it in fact provides a much freer market than the current incarnation of capitalism does. Contributism is based on the concept that a person is happiest and is also most efficient when he or she is doing something that he or she is good at. It's based on the conjecture that people actually enjoy contributing to their society, and that the only reason they don't do it more often is that there are not enough media for doing so. With the internet a new medium has become available for transfer of content.
I'm suggesting that people should pay for content, not for packaging. I consider ABC or ESPN to be little more than packaging for the content, and that it's the content which people are tuning in to watch. Filled with advertisements and aggressive attempts to induce people to purchase items which are, at best, tangentially related to the content that said network is actually delivering, these networks are "middle men" that have set up a parasitic and bad-faith screen between the content being submitted and the consumers of that content. I'm suggesting that we eliminate the middle man. I'm suggesting that, via the internet, people (e.g. the writers of "The Sopranos" or Jane the breakdancer) deliver their content directly to those who appreciate it, and that those appreciators pay their money directly to the writers, actors, etc., instead of funnelling their payment through the corporate middle man (e.g., in the case of The Sopranos, the HBO network). Those who enjoy the content pay for it directly, instead of via the current method which involves watching advertisements that subliminally induce them to purchase things they may not need.
Actually, I'm not suggesting that we completely eliminate the middle man. In the above YouTube application, note that Google gets a fair share of profit ($.40) for contributing the medium itself (namely YouTube). And that's exactly the point. People (or corporations) should be paid for the service they provide, but no more. Another service which a corporation can provide is a means for organizing people into an effective unit. And such a corporation should be paid for so organizing people. However, instead of being workers or laborers as they are now called, perhaps there is some way that the employees could be individually paid for their contribution to the organizational unit and not merely for their labor.
I'm envisioning an economic system, and more generally a society, which trades in the currency of contribution and content. Like capitalism and libertarianism, it is based on a free market. Like socialism or communism, it is totally egalitarian and "people-powered." Unlike communism it discourages laziness; unlike capitalism, it discourages corporate "wage slavery" and blind consumption. Instead, Contributism would encourage action and contribution to a strongly interconnected community.
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By the way, I just searched Google (perhaps I should have done this first) and found that the word "contributism" has been used before, seemingly in reference to a socio-economic model like the one above. So, though I think the above ideas are my own, I don't claim to be the first to propose them.
I would love to hear your comments on the above incarnation of the idea of contributism.
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