I was just reading about Substack and how it pays its star writers a base “salary” while thousands of other hopeful writers contribute free content to the site in the hope that someday they will have a sufficient following to earn money from their scribbling. Free content, that’s what runs Craigslist, Facebook, Substack, and so on, and it is what has killed traditional journalism. Two things jump out at me from this observation. First, we have a society in which lots of capable people have sufficient leisure time to produce mass amounts of writing and give it away for free. It’s not just writing, though, its photographs and stories on Facebook and advertising on Craigslist. This creates some obvious societal problems. Who is going to do the expensive and time consuming work of investigative reporting, if all of the money flows to people who are star commentators? And there are already people countering this problem with grants for local journalism and so on. But the real problem is systemic. The system has created so much wealth (terribly, unjustifiably unequally distributed, but still vast) that scarcity and necessity are no longer very efficient motivators and this causes all sorts of distortions which people then try to counter act with yet more distortions–if there is so much free content and so much profit in star commentators, then we will have to run journalism as charity paid for by “philanthropy”–. This can’t be good for journalism, democracy or society as a whole. Second, the system needs to change. We need a system which benefits from technology rather than having its foundations cut out by technology.