Well I was tired when I posted that and I'm still waking up now so I may be full of shit, but I'll have a stab anyway.
I suppose I was pissed off that she goes on about the middle classes as if they deserve special protection, and makes no comparison to all the fostering of insecurities and wage-eroding stuff that has gone before and affected other groups.
Taking the sensible and important points about exploitation and insecurity and stretching them to some bizarre scenerio where people are somehow always expected to work for free also seemed absurd to me. When harping on about the X Factor and the idea that most wont make a living wage out of the youtube dream, she is missing out the fact that when it comes to many creative jobs, this is hardly a new phenomenon. Long before the internet there were no shortage of starving musicians, actors, writers, etc, the system under which she successfully built a career hardly offered security and a good chance of success to most would-be participants.
This latter point leads me to some dodgy ground that I cannot pretend does not exist when it comes to concepts surrounding competition in a certain sector. The use of greater competition by capitalist forces to erode wages & job security is obvious and to be opposed. Bu on the other hand greater competition also suggests that there is actually greater opportunity for more people to get into the game, that the barriers to entry are lower, and I cannot pretend that is simply a bad or unmentionable thing just because it leads to trouble for those who were lucky or privileged enough to get into the game when the barriers were higher.
When comparing the phenomenon she describes to much earlier assaults on workers due to tecnological change, I am also struck by another difference. Workers making physical stuff often suffered a hefty decline in the enjoyability, variation and freedom of their job as a result of technology, reduced to fleshy extensions of the machine. But in some ways what is happening with the creative world as a result of the internet is quite the opposite - those who do make it may have more freedom, with self-publishing offering an escape from some of the traditional controllers of their work (editors, direct advertising concerns etc). I wont push this point too far though, there are features going in the opposite direction, eg in 'the old days' you might be able to get paid good money to make something special that only had a limited audience, if the org you worked for thought it was still worth it in some way, whereas in the new world there is more pressure on every piece to deliver sufficient eyeballs.
None of these points are supposed to neuter her other points about living wages and security, and even if my criticisms are invalid or of little relevance I still thought it worth posting the article here because it is quite fascinating to see a modern form of technology-induced change and insecurity posing a threat to groups that were previously rather immune to such horrors. It is not surprising if they try to paint this stuff as a new phenomenon worthy of special attention, stuff always seems more important when it affects you, but I'll be unable to resist making some cynical noises about it. Especially when they try to rally others of their class to the cause by raising future spectres. If they are that bothered about the slippery slope then perhaps they should have protested more when it was affecting those who were targets of this phenomenon much earlier, workers with specialised or unspecialised skills which did not afford them an especially loud voice with which to protest and struggle. Workers who were told to suck it up, to embrace the change no matter how corrosive, to get with the times. I will still have sympathy for those previously protected who now find themselves no longer immune to such onslaught, but I will be unable to utterly suppress a wry smile on occasions that the blind eyes they turned in the past have come back to haunt them.
