On entitlement and society
Summary: The democratization of the Internet will cost the jobs of media professionals. Offshore manufacturing will cost the jobs of blue-collar workers. But should we fight to keep those jobs if they are no longer relevant? Were they entitled to those jobs in the first place? I suggest that they weren’t, no more—and no less—than any of us is entitled to anything.
Can you name one thing in your life that you believe you’re entitled to?
How about your job? Your home? Food to eat? Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
There’s quite a bit of entitlement talk going on these days, only the word is rarely used. Consumers feel entitled to pirated content and the recording industry feels entitled to sue consumers. The public feels entitled to health care and the insurance industry feels entitled to exclusions.
Entitlement is the basis of the primary argument in The Cult of the Amateur, the lamenting of a massive shift in the economic infrastructure. How, Keen argues, can we as a society allow Tower Records to shut down? How can we allow YouTube to distract attention from that most valuable of media, television?
…perhaps the biggest casualties of the Web 2.0 revolution are real businesses with real products, real employees, and real shareholders, as I’ll discuss in Chapters 4 and 5. Every defunct record label, or laid-off newspaper reporter, or bankrupt independent bookstore is a consequence of ‘free’ user-generated Internet content—from Craigslist’s free advertising, to YouTube’s free music videos, to Wikipedia’s free information.
(Quick disclaimer: I’ve been giving him a hard time, but Keen makes many excellent points and the book is certainly worth the read.)
Entitlement was also the basis of a conversation I had yesterday. My friend Phillip does a great deal of charity work, part of which includes donating product whose manufacture he controls. Here’s the conflict: if he takes his manufacturing offshore, he can donate much more product; of course, in the process, he takes jobs away from deserving locals.
We were not the only ones having this conversation; it is a conversation that is had around the world at the tables of employers looking to maximize returns and employees fearful of an uncertain economic future. It is a conversation that Ross Perot fueled when he said the result of Nafta would be a giant sucking sound as jobs swirled through the border plughole into Mexico. It is a conversation that the potential presidential candidates are having ad nauseum—at once attempting to balance commercial sustainability with the very real concerns of the working class.
At the core of the question is that innocuous word: ‘deserving.’
Do we deserve to have government and kindly souls keep things as they are indefinitely? If products can be made better and cheaper overseas, do we deserve to keep making them locally?
I humbly suggest that we don’t.
In fact, I humbly suggest that we aren’t entitled, in any sort of inherent sense of the word, to anything.
The world is not built on entitlement; it’s built on agreement.
We agree that all men are endowed with inalienable rights, and we agree to make laws and construct our society to support that agreement.
We agree that we must take care of the least fortunate among us because that is our vision of how a community functions, and we form health care systems and welfare programs. Or we agree that socialist systems remove performance incentives and that if you give too much assistance people will lose their ability to become self-reliant, and we privatize health care and eliminate welfare programs.
We agree that the employment of our population is directly beneficial to everyone in our society, and so we aim to maintain the employment of our population.
But these are all agreements; they are not entitlements. They are agreements with which not everyone agrees, which vary from country to country and city to city and house to house, and sometimes even within a house.
And so while some agree that it is more important to keep a job onshore than to operate in a manner that is sustainable financially, others might not be willing to pay the premium for the product that goes along with that agreement.
Sometimes you have to fight the tide: when everybody agrees that slavery is okay, one person has to stand up and say otherwise, in doing so permitting others to do the same. But the question that should always be asked, every day of a million things, is, ‘Why?” Why am I fighting to keep this job? Is it because it’s the right thing to do, as right as speaking out for abolition? Or is it because this is what I’m used to and what I’m comfortable with?
If the answer is that you’re fighting to maintain what you’re comfortable with, you’ve fallen victim to your own sense of entitlement.
I realize that I’ve gone off on a few tangents here, but I’d still love to hear from you. What are your views on charity? Do you think jobs should be kept open artificially? Should cultural institutions—including for-profit ventures like The New York Times—deserve to remain in business even if the market demands other forms of media?
Feel free to espouse your viewpoint below; dissent welcome.
February 26th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Thanks for the great post. I’m fascinated by how quickly we humans are to take transient things like livelihoods for granted. We didn’t evolves as a species by standing still.
My only concern is that what is socially good about a medium (whatever that means) is preserved by the changes it undergoes. For example, in the mid-90s, Nicholson Baker wrote about the computerization of library index systems. Paper cards in lovely hardwood furniture were being supplanted by big, bad computerized databases. His case was that this was being done sloppily, but minimum-wage-earning keystrokers (mostly students) who didn’t preserve many of the cards’ handwritten notes. Here’s the link (it’s a long one):
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1994/04/04/1994_04_04_064_TNY_CARDS_000365934
At the time I was mortified. Thank goodness, this same technology has bred an internet that is smarter than any of its contributors at helping me find what I need. (”I”m feeling lucky.”) Who knew? Especially in 1994.
Back then it was a false alarm. But I was as worried as Mr. Baker was. How will networks and disintermediation affect other media? Jobs will take care of themselves, as you point out in your post. The bigger question is will we as people seeking connection and knowledge be better or worse for the change. And guess what? We may have to just watch it happen and hope for the best … as I did when I read that New York piece and quietly shuddered.
February 26th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
Hi Kaila,
I enjoyed your post on entitlement/agreement and think you’ve brought up some great points. So often I think people do things, make decisions or form opinions without first asking that basic yet necessary question: “Why?”.
Living in Western society it’s so easy for us to become ingrained with a sense of some sort of ‘minimum standard’ that we ‘deserve’ - I know I feel a sense of frustration at times when I can’t afford something (designer jeans? A latte a day?) and I do feel that it stems from a feeling of “I deserve better than what I currently have”. Which, when I really think about it, is really a load of rubbish!
February 27th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Let not one of us off the hook! Keep capital flowing. No jobs lost. Greater charity. Utter freedom. Free latte! Have you forgotten the Summer of Love, Hunter S. Thompson in the lobby, converting radar to the microwave…? We have just begun to build society, kaff::hiccup::kaff, and much is available we’re culturally struggling to empower.
Not long ago I heard someone say that in 200+ years we’ve improved most of our institutions, i.e. science, technology, industry, war, but nothing much for our society.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:14 am
Hello friends,
Thanks so much for your responses.
@Jeff Larche: there is so much about the traditional that is beautiful that has fallen by the wayside: paper cards in lovely hardwood furniture, fountain pens, cities without chain stores, daily home-cooked meals with the entire family and no television… I could go on.
We are right to appreciate these, and to fight to maintain them where feasible. What is totally unproductive is lament without action, cries of, ‘Chain stores are ruining society!’ between sips of Starbucks.
And sometimes, human nature being what it is, it takes the disappearance of something for it to become appreciated.
@Sharon, what a great comment! I think our tendency is to look at those who have more and ask, ‘Why not me?’ We could, perhaps, look at those who have less and ask the same.