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12:03 am - Content Economy

They are just like all the other sad, sad folks who pass through my office. They don't understand how they got into this mess. They only just realized there was a problem.



"How much are you paying each month, at this point?" I ask them. "How much you owe, I mean."



The young man has a stack of bills and some pages of notes that I asked him to prepare in advance. He shuffles them around a bit in a disorganized way that already tells me a great deal about how they got into their situation.



"About forty thousand words," he says. "Sixty-three pictures. Five and a half minutes of video and about twenty-two minutes of music."



"Can you produce anywhere near that much content on a regular basis?" I ask him, already knowing the answer. He shakes his. No, of course he can't.



"How did you rack up so much media-debt?"



He shrugs. His wife answers this time: "We didn't realize how quickly it would add up. We kept signing in and it kept letting us download to our palmpads… Anything we wanted. We were keeping the content bills caught up just fine, producing the monthly minimum, but the minimum kept creeping up and up…"



I nodded. "And then you missed a payment, your digital brokerage raised the interest rate, and suddenly the minimum jumped to a level you couldn't pay even in a really good month. And now you're at your media limit."



There was a long pause, silence hanging there between us.



"Is there anything we can do?" the husband finally inquired timidly.



"Absolutely," I reassured him. "The first thing is going to be relinquishing as much media as possible. De-auth absolutely everything that isn't critical." I pawed through several of the pages they brought with him. "Do you really need sixty-five different covers of 'You Really Got Me'?" I peered over the top of the paper at them, trying to be stern without judgmental. "No, of course not. You only need the Kinks. Delete the rest. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. All of these movies you'll never actually watch again… And these books! Are you ever actually going to get around to reading any of these biographies?"



They looked at each other uncomfortably before finally, together, both shaking their heads slightly.



"As soon as you cut yourself free of all this deadweight licensing," I told them, "we'll be able to see what your actual subsistence entertainment run-rate is. You find that rate and you *stick to it*. At that point, we can probably work out some short deadline work - maybe a weekly column or a daily comic strip or something - that will keep you producing content at a high enough rate to get above the debt line. Then the same math that was working against you before will work for you: as you produce more internet content than you consume, your monthly content-creation quota will go down instead of up."



"But what if we can't even maintain a creative output at the reduced level? We're not really writers or great photographers or musicians or anything…"



"Well," I said grimly, "as a final resort, of course, you could declare porn bankruptcy."



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