Since, I’m a lowly occasional reader, and not a member, perhaps I shouldn’t comment on this, but who am I kidding? There is no real choice here. So here is the quotation:
I‘m also opposed to the increasing presence in our organization of webscabs, who post their creations on the net for free. A scab is someone who works for less than union wages or on non-union terms; more broadly, a scab is someone who feathers his own nest and advances his own career by undercutting the efforts of his fellow workers to gain better pay and working conditions for all. Webscabs claim they’re just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they’re undercutting those of us who aren’t giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work.
Since more and more of SFWA is built around such electronically mediated networking and connection based venues, and more and more of our membership at least tacitly blesses the webscabs (despite the fact that they are rotting our organization from within) — given my happily retrograde opinions, I felt I was not the president who would provide SFWAns the “net time” they seemed to want at this point in the organization’s development, or who would bless the contraction of our industry toward monopoly, or who would give imprimatur to the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch.
Now my difficulty is avoiding a tirade on scabs and unions–in which I propose a complete inversion of the usual moralistic portrayal. I’ll try to leave that one alone. Since no one is on strike the real issue is whether one is, or if it is as bad to be, a mataphorical scab. And unless that question is addressed directly there is simply no traction to the entire rant.
Here is some pretty direct counter evidence to the idea that free promotionals on the web are undercutting writing wages.
But I want to look at the issue differently. Consider Crimson Dark. As far as I can tell the writer had no agent and no real connection to comic book publishing. So instead of investing months in quiet solitude developing a project with no audience, he published his work on the web at his own expense. I seriously doubt that this has proven to be the path to financial prosperity. I don’t think that’s the point.
The only one who is doing work for low wages is the writer himself! How on earth does this harm anyone else. I haven’t been reading comic books for years for financial reasons. If I had never discovered Crimson Dark that would still be true. There is no mainstream comic book publisher out there who has been hurt by Crimson Dark.
I’m just better off because of someone else’s free gift. It is really hard not to imagine that Mencken’s version of Puritanism lies behind this erroneous economic analysis–the haunting fear that someone somewhere is having a good time.
