Inside the Convergence

Do you know Chris?

You know, that Chris. He speaks of Convergence. What is that anyway?

It’s multimedia. The real stuff, not just the marketing dribble used to sell Tandy’s in 1992. This is beyond playing Myst and The Seventh Guest on PC CD-ROM. This is the real deal. It’s what you want, when you want it, how you want it.

Of course, payment is something entirely different. It’s a touchy subject. No netizen I know likes to pay for things. Not a single one. I mean, $4 coffees are cool, but $.50 micropayments are not. I don’t care how good your content is, it will be “stolen” which in our new vocabulary is “sharing.”

But hey, it’s cool. You do what you gotta do to get your content.

Bittorrent of LOST? You got it. Want your news by the truckload? You got it. Download a few Bittorrents while eating your salad and reading your Gmail through your free WiFi? It’s what you gotta do to keep current.

Today’s information highway is a vast ocean of technology and opinons, vying for eyeballs. If Attention is the new Portal, then let me say that AttentionTrust should be paying me for tracking my browsing habits. But they’re not. They don’t want to do that.

And you wanna know why? Because netizens are friggin cheap. We can spend $400 on an X-Box, but we can’t donate $5 to a great site. We want our blogs to be good, interesting, insightful, funny and heartwarming, but holy shit are you a sell out if you want to try and make money doing it (props to Trent).

Me? I haven’t seen an ad in a looong time. I run adblock, I update my HOSTS file to keep away the evil advertisers, desperate to show me something they know in their heart of hearts I’m probably not going to buy.

Am I the only asshole who looks at every product link with suspicion? I want to know if your affiliate username is on the end of your links. I’ve gone so far to simply note the product, load up amazon.com and find the product on my own just to get around the 5% you might make on it.

It’s okay though. It’s “long tail.” It’s “revolutionary marketing.” It’s “attention being number one.”

But no, it’s not. It’s attention for attention’s sake. You’ll receive no money from me. I’ll subscribe to your full RSS feed, but I won’t visit your site. You may even put some banners in your feed, but I’ll block those too. It’s okay, we know you’re trying. But pushing against a netizen is like fighting in the water: By the time you would land a blow, we’re already on a different station. A different provider, another upload or download.

Dear content: We only want to use you. We never loved you. But we’re happy with our one night stand relationship. It’s cute how you try to make me watch commercials on my DVR, even cuter the whole “LOST is on for 1 hour and 1 minute” just so you can screw up our recordings of other shows on other channels. But that doesn’t work. It’s 1980’s tech, VCR recording tech. You should know that by now.

Do you want to know why big media is scared of putting content online? Because of us. Advanced netizens find loopholes and backdoors and create them in code or in gateways or in lookup systems. We don’t want to contribute to your ratings system, we want to build a social network. We don’t want your gimmick, we want the real thing. We’re spoiled and we admit it. We relish in how much we have, from the size of our mp3 collections to our TV show CD-Rs that stack up around our desks.

Convergence is just another cute term for not giving a shit about who made the information we digest, just that we have it. That we can control it. Chris notes, “Control is an illusion.”

But it’s more than an illusion online. It’s a figment. A fleeting dream.

Inside the internet beats the heart of cheapskates. We revel in giving away our best stuff, and we scoff at old capitalism markets. Music became something not to pay for, but to fill space. And there is a lot of space out there, on hard drives and mp3 players and USB keys and laptops.

Are we not entertained? Continuously. And advertising is not entertainment. And so it is filtered away, it is blocked out, it is left behind.

Netizens of the world know this. Citizens are only now realizing it. If 90’s era Napster was the closest you got to free content, you’re just not paying attention.

If I were an ad exec, I’d be saving my pennies. If I were a network exec, I’d be hiding under my desk.

We want to think our opinions and discussions are worth paying for. And they are. But only in the currency of attention, which to a real world consisting of cars and jobs and bills and late payments means absolutely nothing. Relishing in your cable provider’s website doesn’t mean anything to them. Clicking on their advertisements doesn’t lower your bill.

In this new era of eyeballs and keyboards ruling the world, making money is circumspect. Your credibility is all you have online, and tainting that can doom you faster than going on a reality TV show.

Everyone wants convergence except those who we converge with. Those whose content we use. Those whose product has become a commodity, a tradable item, an email attachment.

You have a call on line 1, Mr. Producer. It’s the internet. And we’re coming for your hard work. And the desks. And the office supplies.

And if you fuck with us, we’ll spam you into oblivion and take it anyway. Just so we’re clear.

But we can be nice about things. We can share links and silently giggle while blocking out the content that makes the least sense to us. The onslaught of pop-ups in the 90’s showed what intrusiveness is really like. The convergence of the 00’s shows the world that we’re cheap, we’re not going to leave, and building a better gate isn’t going to keep the cows in.

But Mr. Producer, we’ll throw you a link in our blog. That’s enough in our currency. It’s like a $20 tip for getting us a cup of coffee in the morning. It’s our payment system. No cash, no checks, just eyeballs.

Welcome to the New Net Order.

The Atlantic was born today and I’ll tell you how:
The clouds above it opened up and let it out