Well, That’s Depressing
A friend sent me over to 99Designs to check it out, and I had to have a glass of whiskey to drown the deepening sense of despair that overtook me. 99Designs is the digital equivalent of standing outside a Home Depot waving at pick up trucks as they pull into the lot, looking for a sheet-rock gig. It is digital day labor.
Let me say this, out of the gate: I don’t bear any ill will to the gentlemen who started the site:. It’s a good idea, on it’s surface, and it’s a market niche that someone was eventually going to fill. It’s just a shame that it was going to happen, regardless.
99Design’s site boasts
Number of Designers: 49,486
Prize Money Awarded: $7,296,679
Total Designs submitted: 2,835,483
Impressive stats on the surface, though some quick and dirty math suggests a bit more sobering numbers. Let’s assume that every one of those submitted designers wins one project, for the sake of argument. That’s about 147 bucks a project. Assuming that a standard, simple design job takes you two days of work (or about 16 billable hours), thats…
About nine bucks an hour.
Ouch.
I understand that the assumptions underlying my argument are so specious that any good lawyer would have taken me out in the back and shot me. Allow me to justify myself a little bit. Obviously, not every designer gets a job. But this doesn’t make the picture rosier for the designers who do. Let’s assume only half the designers get awarded a job, with the same amount of jobs still on the board: that’s still time spent doing work, at 9 dollars an hour, for double the amount of time. A week’s worth of work at 9 dollars an hour? 360 dollars, or $18,700 a year. That’s at the official poverty line for a family of three, by US Government standards. And the US Government poverty guidelines are way out of whack anyway. (That’s ignoring the rate of about $2.50 per design submitted: I don’t even want to calculate the productivity rate of that.)
So what are we to make of this? Call it DIY Culture Wars: The Level Playing Strikes Back. Before the web, creatives were creatives because of long schooling, draftmanship, internships, connections, and occasionally, hard work. One of the great things about the digital revolution was that it gave the keys to everyone. Remember all those 1990′s solipistic tropes about “empowerment”?
There was a brief window of time when this “empowerment” was there for the taking by the early adopters, the geeks, and those with initiative and enough talent. The predictive and collaborative nature of the web is sometimes depressingly accurate; there’s a whole host of people that make a living creating obvious statements about where the web is headed (yours truly included.) I’m a firm believer in the collective unconscious. Does anyone really believe that YouTube wouldn’t have sprung up in another form, in another place, if Steve Chen hadn’t done it first? This is tough to explain to those that have “made it”, but sometimes, “making it” is as much about fortune and luck as it is about talent.
Around 2003, empowerment in the creative class hit it’s stride, the idea that being a freelancer or contractor became not only doable, but desirable, talent be damned. And then another weird turn occured. The empowerment became less about the doing, and more about the accoutrements. When the the history of the great DIY Upsurge is written, stuff will play the villians.
Now, if you take a walk in the kitchenware section of a department store these days: nearly every other item is listed as “professional grade”, as if you need Wolfstoff knives and a copper pans to reheat Mac -n-Cheese. Look at the montrosities that hang around tourists necks these days, or listen to the pale salemen carp on about “megapixels” in the camera department. The 5th grader has a computer that can render digital video at lightning fast speeds, even though he uses it for little more writing papers, porn, and playing video games. This is where, finally, “empowerment” has come to rest.
And so we turn back 99Designs, in which everyone with with nice computers, and (perhaps illegal) copies of Creative Suite, slings hastily slapped-together designs on a wall, hoping they stick, and trying to do it in as little time as possible, so that the pittance of pays is worth it. What used to be the firm stamping grounds of the manufacturing industry – doing it faster and cheaper, so that the middle class can hold their ground under the onslaught of rising costs and companies that pay less and less for labor – has finally come to the creative class, and it’s a sad day, for me at least.
I’m not the most talented person out there, I’m not a genius, and if I ever tell you I’m a ‘visionary’, please punch me in the face. But I do work hard, constantly, and I am very proud of my work. I also am very proud of how I get compensated. But it’s a sad day when you see the next generation of creatives being forced back into their cage; that which was made to free us has merely exposed us the wider economy, and what used to be our our special little clubby corner is now being outsourced. Far be it for me to sound like anti-populist, but Viva La Protectionism, comrades.
Make Yourself Heard