Your Unemployed Future

Once I had a newspaper, made it run…..

As a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (’83) I watch with a mixture of incredulity and sadness as legions of my classmates and alumni hit the streets as their papers close, perhaps never to work again.

Sadness because this is so painfully inevitable; incredulity because I firmly believe that this is only the beginning of a massive overturning of conventional jobs and employment. Make no mistake, what is happening to newspapers today will hit magazines tomorrow, TV stations the day after, and even that is only the beginning.

The arrival of the web bodes more than the end of the printed page, it is the end of a way of life for just about everyone.

Everything is going to change, and massive cultural upheavals are no fun to live through for those who have to live through them.

Mass unemployment, and the virtual eliminanation of whole classes of jobs and careers will be the first harbinger that the change is upon us, and the clear signs are already here.

Youtube today uploads a breathaking 13 hours of video every minute.

Most conventional production companies would take a year to produce 13 hours of content. Youtube, and all that it implies does it every minute.

When Google bought Youtube (for $1.65 billion) it had just 60 employees.  They worked over a pizza parlor in a single office.

The Disney Company has, by way of comparison, 133,000 employees.

Skype, which is rapidly chowing through the telephone industry the way that Craigslist destroyed newspapers, was bought by eBay for $2.1 billion.  When the deal was signed, Skype had 55 million customers, twice the number of customers served by British Telecom.  Skype employed a total of 200 people.  British Telecom – 90,000.

Speaking of Craigslist,  the engine of destruction for the newspaper business: 22 employees.

What is clear is that the remarkable leveraging power of the web, the free global distribution, tied to entirely new mechanisms for producing content (ie, no printers, paper, ink, trucks, trees and God only knows what else) changes not just the distributive platform, but also the very means of production.  The architecture of the whole machine is not reduced, it is reconstructed from scratch.

In our own simple experience, we run a small hyperlocal TV operation in Washington DC.  We produce a half-hour of original local content for cable every day, 365 days a year.  We have no offices, no building, no Executive Producers, no secretaries, no receptionists, no carpet, no desks, no nothing in fact. Our total employee count: 7

What has happened to the media is going to happen to other industries as well.  Careers that once seemed secure are going to evaporate and be gone forever.

Are we then looking at a world in which 99% of the population is unemployed?

I don’t know.

What we do know is that since the introduction of the web, we have begun to see a concentration of wealth in the hands of the very few unlike anything that has ever happened in this country before.  Since 1980, the share of income in the US held by the top 0.1% of the population has jumped from 2% to 7%.  In 1970 the senior business executive was earning 25 times the average workers. Today, that number is a staggering 350 times.

Of course, the web has had an enormous impact on the financial markets as it has on the media, we have simply not yet unwound that connection – but that too is coming.

Where does this all lead?

What career beckons as so much closes down?

Nicholas Carr in The Big Switch, (which I am reading now, and from whom I got much of the data above), quotes from Chris Anderson’s 2006 book The Long Tail, and says:

“millions of ordinary people [now] have the tools and the role models to become amateur producers. Some of them will also have the talent and the vision. Because the means of production have spread so widely and to so many people, the talented and visionary ones, even if they’re a small fraction of the total, are becoming a force to be reckoned with”.